Books for Review should be sent to: Don
D'Ammassa, 323 Dodge Street, East Providence, RI 02914

Last Update 5/29/07

Saving the World
and Other Extreme Sports by James Patterson, Little, Brown, 2007,
$16.99, ISBN 978-0-316-15560-1

It is a sad situation when young adult science
fiction has deteriorated so much that this is a successful series.
Patterson, who is presumably much better writing contemporary thrillers,
has taken one very implausible premise and developed it into, so far,
three books. The young protagonists are mutants, the results of
mixing human and bird DNA, so they develop wings and can fly. The
fact that this is physically impossible is glossed over. Anyway,
their existence was discovered back in the first book and they have been
pursued by another group of mutants, crossbred with wolves.

The action gets ratcheted up in this one as the six
teenagers become aware of a plot to make use of this radical form of
genetic engineering to create world domination. Yes, it's the
super race plot in another form. Patterson generates lots of
action by splitting the pack of heroes up so that each has his or her
own story line, although they all converge as the book progresses.
I don't have a problem with simplifying the technical content for
younger readers, but I do have a problem when an author doesn't take
rudimentary steps to make sure his science is at least plausible.
5/29/07

Larry Niven's stories of Known Space will always
stand out for me as one of best future histories I've ever read.
They mixed hard science and fine storytelling and made use of a
background so interesting that it sometimes distracted from the main
plot. They're my favorite kind of space opera among my favorite
fiction (particularly the short stories). Niven's newest book is a
return to that universe, to chronicle events that took place around the
time the Puppeteers decided to evacuate the galaxy. A lone human
ship encounters a planet that has been turned into a slow but steady
spaceship, and finds more than they bargained for, although we aren't
told until much later what it was they actually stumbled into.
Centuries later, a more organized expedition is preparing to contact the
Gw'oth, intelligent creatures that resemble starfish, who apparently
developed a technology from simple fire to atomic fusion within a couple
of generations. A formidable adversary if it comes to that.

An expedition begins to watch them secretly because
the Fleet of Worlds (entire planets fleeing the wave of radioactivity
sweeping through the galaxy) will pass relatively close to the Gw'oth.
Most of the party believe the aliens are brilliant but primitive, but
one of their number has a different theory, that they use a kind of
group consciousness and have worked out the implications of technology
in advance, which might put them technically far ahead rather than
behind. We see much of this through the eyes of a human who was
raised under Puppeteer tutelage, which has purposes hidden from her. The
disappearance of virtually the entire Puppeteer species has also caused
considerable consternation and disruption within the human dominated
worlds. The book has much of the feel of the older stories, and
Nessus is a delightful if enigmatic character. It was good to have
this gap in the history of Known Space filled but while the novel is
quite good, it didn't deliver the impact I remembered from earlier
installments like A Gift from Earth and Ringworld. Possibly this
is another example of the fact that you can't go home again, and I'd
certainly put this on my list of recommended books for the year. The
authors, the world, and this reader have all changed considerably in the
interval and the old, innocent sense of wonder has apparently become harder to
arouse. 5/28/07

The blurbs accompanying this first novel spend a
lot of time comparing the author to Robert A. Heinlein and the novel
itself to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, my favorite of his works.
I didn't think either characterization was particularly relevant,
although that should not be construed to mean I didn't like the book. It
shares some of Heinlein's themes, but only peripherally and certainly
not those with which he is most closely associated. The setting is
a future in which the world is evolving toward a world government, or at
least the closest thing to one we're likely to see. Three men are
going to have a powerful influence on the shape that future takes, and
they are motivated by three different and powerful reasons - ambition,
revenge, and love of art.

The prime motivator for union - and in fact
domination - is a brilliant but warped high tech businessman who has
quietly launched a plan designed to make him the most powerful man on
Earth. His most overt opposition is a former employee, who knows
some of the details of the conspiracy and wants to derail it. He
is hindered to some extent, however, because he's effectively playing
the monomaniac's game, and the odds are not in his favor. The real
opposition comes from Aqualung, leader of an immensely popular rock
group, who really doesn't have a political agenda at all. But
everything is politics. When the colonies off Earth rebel against
what they see as a potential system-wide dictatorship, but despite the
relatively passive power of the infrastructure, Aqualung has a much more
active power. His music, and the equipment with which he and his
band mates produce it, can literally influence human emotions.
There's considerably more, but I won't spoil things by revealing too
much. The novel is an odd mix of hard science and cyberpunk, space
opera and dystopia, melodramatic with a touch of humor. It's the
kind of seductive mix that has the potential to spread outside the field
like the early works of William Gibson. It's also the kind of
novel that will be hard to imitate; like Chester Anderson's The
Butterfly Kid, it's likely to have a very devoted group of fans.
How large that group will be remains to be seen. 5/24/07

Ivory by Mike Resnick, Pyr, 8/07, $15.95,
ISBN 978-1-59102-546-7

Just a mention here of this reprint rather than a
review. I read this when it first appeared almost twenty years
ago. It was my favorite of Resnick's cycle of novels each of which
was loosely based on the history of one Africa or on African customs,
courtesy of his research and several safaris. This one involves a
search for a pair of ivory tusks which have been lost for thousands of
years, a journey that takes him to several worlds. A panoramic
space opera with a touch of mystery and one of Resnick's best novels,
out of print for far too long. 5/19/07

This is the sequel to the author's previous
Event, which introduced the Event Group to us, a kind of super
X-Files, an organization secretly created by the US government and
equipped with nifty technological toys, with their mission being to
investigate those things which usually show up in the tabloids rather
than the legitimate papers - flying saucers, supernatural events, and so
forth. I found their first adventure reasonably entertaining
without being anything special, particularly because its antecedents
were pretty obvious, even though I'm a big fan of writers working
somewhat similar veins like James Rollins, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln
Child.

This time they're off to South America to
investigate a legend that may have a strong basis in reality, and which
might still be hidden somewhere in the jungle. They have a series
of adventures, some of them violent, before reaching their goal and
discovering the truth. The secret in this case is rather
reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a humanoid creature
apparently immune to the effects of radiation which can live on land or
in the water with equal facility. The "monster" turns out to be a
branch of early humankind which developed a tolerance for radioactivity
and which chose through some mechanism to become amphibians. I'm
not sure that the biology would pass muster here but that's really not
what the book is about. It's an adventure story, with
moderately well developed tension, considerably more interesting than
its predecessor. There are a few rough spots in the prose but
nothing serious. I don't think this one is likely to make it to
the bestseller lists but the improvement from the first novel is
considerably and shows a trend in the right direction. 5/18/07

Jeff
Carlson’s debut novel bears some resemblance to Greg Bear’s Blood
Music. Someone has released a swarm of nanomachines which recreate
themselves from the substance of carbon based lifeforms, that is, every
animal on Earth including humans. The spread is rapid and unstoppable
and the only survivors are those who manage to reach high altitudes
where the nanomachines no longer function. The story opens at one small
mountain outpost where a handful of people survive by making dangerous,
short trips down into the infected areas, and by killing and eating one
another. Although initially isolated, they eventually make contact with
others and discover that an orbiting installation might be the last
remaining hope of finding a cure for what is effectively a plague.

Things are not entirely as they seem, and most of
the conflict is between humans rather than against the mindless
microscopic menace. Carlson does a fine job of plotting and telling his
story. My major problem with the novel was a strategic one. Since we
know from the outset that his two primary characters are murderers and
cannibals, it’s rather difficult to invest any emotional capital in
their troubles and successes, even when they acknowledge themselves that
they’ve become a kind of monster. There’s considerable talent at work
here, and I wouldn’t shy away from his next book, but my inability to
sympathize with his characters got in the way with this one. 5/14/07

The sixth installment in the Vampire Earth series
sets off in a slightly different direction. Readers of the earlier
volumes will already know that Earth has been invaded and partially
conquered by a race of alien vampires who use other alien lifeforms as
their soldiers and weapons of subjugation. David Valentine was a
leader of the main resistance force in North America, although he has
become rather distanced from that group thanks to events in earlier
volumes. Humanity isn't fighting alone. The Lightbearers
have been helping to stem the tide of the invasion, but when David is
lured back into a not altogether easy new relationship with his former
allies, he discovers that the Lightbearers may be on the verge of
defeat, or at least preparing to withdraw from the battle. Or has
the human race been misinterpreting the true nature of what's been
happening right from the start?

Knight mixes bits of military SF, survivalist
fiction, the alien invasion story, and other elements including more
than a mild dose of horror, although the atmosphere has turned more and
more toward adventure with a hint of mystery during the latter volumes
in the series. Old fashioned alien invasion stories are pretty
much extinct, and the Vampire Earth series is hardly old fashioned, but
it's the closest thing we're likely to see for the time being. I have a
bit of trouble identifying with Valentine, which makes it difficult to
feel the emotional content of the story at times, but I'm entertained
following his adventures, and it's nice to have some evil vampires, even
if they do come from another planet.5/13/07

The multi-author Necromunda series is apparently
based on a role playing game which I've never seen and know little about
except through the series of tie-in novels, which indicate that it's a
cyberpunkish future in which lawlessness is the norm, humanity has
spread to the stars, cities are gigantic, and the distinctions between
nations and races have been replaced with new divisions. There's
also an effective caste system based on hereditary wealth. Within
the broad setting, Will McDermott has been chronicling the adventures of
Kal Jerico, who was a professional bounty hunter in his previous
adventures, but who takes a dramatic step upward in this one. The
local ruler is dead and someone needs to assume command. Against
his judgment and virtually at gunpoint, Jerico agrees to accept the
position, but he knows as quickly as does the perceptive reader that
this isn't going to be a honeymoon. No sooner is his position
confirmed than the plotting and pressuring begin because while no one
may particularly want the throne, everyone apparently wants to control
it. Fast paced action but not much to think about. It still
beats the latest adventure of Captain Kirk. 5/11/07

I didn't re-read this, which includes the fourth
and fifth novels in the Chanur series, Chanur's Homecoming and
Chanur's Legacy, but I wanted to mention it here because this joint
volume is one of the best buys you'll get for your money. The
series is still my favorite of Cherryh's work, and I miss the universe
she created for it. These were originally published in 1987 and
1992 respectively. In the first, the feline aliens find themselves
caught between two rival forces, their homeworld in jeopardy, and in the
second a young and newly appointed spaceship captain gets caught up in
intrigue and adventure. Some of the best space opera I've ever
read. The first three volumes were previously collected as The
Chanur Saga, and that's an even better buy. 5/9/07

Tobias Buckell follows up his impressive debut
novel with this exciting and inventive space adventure. The set up is
rather complicated and I’m going to over simplify a bit, but humanity
has more or less been conquered by aliens. Those planets not directly
controlled are interdicted by cutting off access to the wormholes that
provide travel between star systems. Some human commerce is tolerated
but certain kinds of technology are restricted, and many humans are
subjected to devices which can tamper with their memories and
personalities in order to ensure their docility. The ragamuffins are a
kind of informal military force from the isolated worlds, considered
pirates by the alien overlords.

Enter Nashara, an ex-ragamuffin, sort of, who has
been augmented to make her into a super soldier capable of surviving
exposure to vacuum, of undermining the computer systems of the alien
empire, and of defeating even other enhanced soldiers in physical
combat. She completes a mission on one world – assassinating a highly
placed alien – only to be betrayed by her employers, who hoped she would
become a martyr figure and were somewhat nonplused when she survived.
She escapes her supposed benefactors, but with both sides looking for
her, options are limited and eventually she takes refuge aboard a
ragamuffin ship.

And that's just the first quarter of this exciting
space opera, but I'm not going to tell you about what happens after that
because the story is too rich and interesting to spoil, and even if I
wanted to, it's so complex that it would be difficult to do it justice.
It's space opera, of course, but a heavily textured one. Buckell
is quickly proving himself a writer to shelve right there with C.J.
Cherryh, Alastair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, and those few other writers who
have managed to adopt the advantages of mainstream literature without
giving up the skilled storytelling and sense of wonder of old style SF. 5/5/07

One of the subsidiary stories in the futuristic
half of the Warhammer universe involves various units of space marines,
trained to fight the forces allied with evil, but like Marvel
superheroes, apparently just as interested in killing each other.
The Soul Drinkers are one of these units, their history chronicled by
author Counter in his own little corner of that universe. The Soul
Drinkers became virtual outlaws because they were mutating far beyond
the limits intended and are perceived as being a danger to their
masters. In this installment, they have found a way of preventing the
mutation from going any further, but with an apparent solution at hand,
they discover they have a new problem. Some of their number are
reluctant to return to the status quo ante, in fact, they'd just as soon
attack their former masters. Battles and arguments both ensue,
with lots of rather corny speeches, jungle battles, imperial disdain,
personal combat, and so forth. The previous books in this
subordinate series were competent military SF, as is this, but I don't
remember the dialogue being this stilted or the characters being quite
so cardboard. The whole story feels rushed and incomplete.
5/4/07

Although
there are still a handful of uncollected Philip K. Dick stories out
there, you won't find any of them in this newest cross collection, which
does include several stories that have found their way to Hollywood -
"Imposter", "Second Variety", "Paycheck", and "We Can Remember It for
You Wholesale". They're all good ones, as are several of the
others including "The Variable Man", "The Days of Perky Pat", and "The
Preserving Machine". This title accompanies reprints of several of
Dick's novels, all in reasonably uniform editions. I can't imagine
why you'd need an excuse to re-read his work, but if you do, this is as
good as any. The selection covers his early and middle
careers - from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. Just reading
the table of contents reminded me of how distinctive and original his
work was.5/3/07

Marvelous invention stories have always been among
my favorites. You know the type. Someone makes a radical
breakthrough and the author explores the consequences. Bob Shaw's
slowglass, which allows light to pass through so slowly that you can
look into it and see the past, or H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods.
Joe Haldeman's newest is about a marvelous invention, and it's also an
offbeat time travel story. Matthew is a brilliant but unfocused
laboratory assistant who assembles a calibrator that travels in time,
though only forward. Each use is a longer jump, which obviously
limits its usefulness. Matthew has just lost his girl and his job,
so he decides to connect the machine to an antique gas-fueled automobile
and jump into the future a few weeks, but when he reappears in the
middle of a busy street, he discovers that he is wanted for murder.
Someone mysteriously posts bail and he takes advantage of that to jump
even further forward in time.

Almost twenty years forward, he discovers that the
truth has come out, his reappearance calculated, and he has been awarded
a position on the MIT faculty. Of course, the world has changed
radically during the interval and everything he thought he knew about
physics is pretty much outdated. No one, however, has been able to
duplicate his time machine. His situation begins to grow
complicated again so he steals the time machine and uses it again,
propelling himself almost two centuries forward. By this point the
novel had begun to remind me of Lawrence Manning's The Man Who Awoke,
but with a sense of humor. Matthew picks up a companion or two and
visits a succession of increasingly bizarre futures. One of the
classic SF themes given new life. I'm not sure if it's possible to
feel nostalgic about something new, but if so, this is the book that
will do it. 5/2/07

Kage Baker has been chronicling the history of the
Company since In the Garden of Iden in 1998, but with this new title the
sequence has apparently come to a conclusion. The Company is a
mysterious organization that reminds me in some ways of Isaac Asimov's
The End of Eternity or the Snakes and Spiders of Fritz Leiber's
Changewar stories. Baker's creation is a good deal more complex,
however, ranging through time and space, exploring the consequences of
immortality, cyborgs, virtual immortality, and other more or less
familiar devices of the genre. The Company itself has a secretive
past, and it is not clear at times who is in charge or why. Now it
all comes to a head.

The enemies of the Company are preparing to seize
control and some of those who might have defended the organization are
hampered for various reasons. There are so many separate story
threads interwoven here that any attempt to summarize the plot - plots
really - in a few words is doomed to be inadequate or even misleading.
There is dissension among the ranks - real and perceived - a powerful
artificial intelligence which may have its own plans, a great secret
revealed at last, shifting loyalties and surprising disloyalties.
It took me a while to get invested in this series, but at some point I
got sucked in and it was quite pleasant to finally have the secrets
revealed, the conspiracies exposed, and the conflicts resolved. It
will be interesting to see what shape Baker's writing takes from this
point forward. 4/26/07

Even though I obviously have no more experience of
the other planets of this solar system than I do of those surrounding
another star, I've always preferred a solar rather than interstellar
setting for adventures in outer space. Mars is my favorite of the
available choices, but the asteroid belt is a close second, and I've
loved stories set there since Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Pirates
of the Asteroids and Alan E. Nourse's Scavengers in Space. Ben
Bova's recent loosely related sequence of novels about exploration of
the solar system is among my favorite hard SF, and of them my favorite
subsequence is the Asteroid Wars, of which this is volume 4. The
original three novels dealt with the battle for commercial and political
control of the asteroids, chiefly through the rivalry of two influential
and determined men, and seen through the eyes of several characters.
That conflict eventually resulted in what was essentially open warfare
which spread to the other colonies as well, a conflict resolved in the
previous book in the series.

The present volume is - as you might guess from the
title - set following the theoretical cessation of overt hostilities.
Theory and practice aren't always the same. One of the
protagonists is forced to flee when the habitat occupied by his family
is attacked, escaping his pursuers only by taking refuge with a woman
who seeks to manipulate him for purposes of her own. Humphries,
the villain of earlier novels, is under the influence of an alien
artifact and is determined to kill everyone who knows of its existence
and its properties. But Humphries doesn't have as much control
over events as he believes and will eventually be forced into a
confrontation not of his making. Other characters include an artist and
a cyborg, both of whom have been exposed to the artifact and both of
whom will play major rules in the future of human civilization.
The upbeat ending felt a trifle contrived but not enough to spoil the
story for me. 4/26/07

This is reviewed in this category because there are
a few SF or related stories, but most are mundane erotic stories – a
phrase I never expected to use. A common problem with fiction published
first as erotica and second as fiction is that it frequently gives short
shrift to the fiction part and is instead a series of descriptive scenes
involving sex, kinky or otherwise. Paradoxically, others which actually
have a strong plot don’t work as well as erotica, often because the
overt sex slows the action or functions as more of an abstraction than a
plot element. And then, of course, there are those stories where the
sexual component isn’t erotic as much as it is sniggering lewdness, the
author self consciously proving that he or she can use dirty words and
imagery and get away with it.

Fortunately, Polly Frost avoids these pitfalls most
of the time, although the opening story, “The Threshold”, does have a
teenaged protagonist whose obsession with losing her virginity comes
across as awkward and artificial. “The Orifice”, which follows, is much
more successful, following the affair of two people whose sexual
encounters involve exotic piercings, and some of the bizarre imagery at
the piercing parlor is particularly effective. There’s some wry humor in
“The Dominatrix Has a Career Crisis” and a comparatively strong story in
“The Pleasure Invaders”, whose protagonist is a police officer addicted
to an alien sexual drug. Another drug, Viagra, morphs into a new
addictive substance that causes sexual rampages in “Viagra Babies”,
which also has a distinct twist of science fiction.

“Imagine It” didn’t work for me. An author of a
book on sexual techniques has an epiphany. Nor did “Playing
Karen Devere”, in which a female serial killer’s life story is to be
told on film. “Test Drive” could almost be an old time SF satire, set a
few years from now when technological toys abound and sexual
experimentation has become the fashion of the moment. At times it
reminded me of the Woody Allen film, Sleeper. “Visions of
Ecstasy” didn’t interest me either, a story about sexual asphyxiation.
The book ends with the title story, the strongest in the book, a fantasy
of sorts about voodoo fetishists with sexual powers that actually work.
Genre fans aren’t going to find enough genre content to interest them,
but may find the juxtaposition of frank eroticism and familiar themes
intriguing. Erotica fans should be happy because the stories are strong
and the genre content isn’t significant enough to require familiarity with SF
or fantasy. 4/25/07

Although
you might think from the title that this is a collection of military SF
stories, that’s not the case, although there are military situations in
some of its contents. Rather this is a selection of stories about the
darker side of technological development, a message conveyed bluntly by
the opening story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which suggests that the
kind of suicide bombings we have seen in recent years will soon give way
to something worse, an echo of what really happened in Vietnam and could
happen again in a more sophisticated fashion in the future. Geoffrey
Landis has a more hopeful vision, the use of a non-lethal weapon that
actually saves lives. Paul J. McAuley illustrates that absolute power
corrupts when a refugee boy on a relatively primitive world acquires a
handgun that is equipped with artificial intelligence, a device by means
of which he acquires great power, but loses something of himself in the
process.

Dena Bain Taylor and Mark L. Van Name provide two
more overtly military stories, the first involving a radical new
technology during a conflict on Mars, sometimes verging on technobabble,
the second partnering a human with a sentient war machine. Both are
readable but unexceptional. Similarly James Cobb describes an incident
between a high tech terrorist attack via missiles and a mostly automated
and even higher tech defensive system, but the story is all about the
attack itself and things like characters or background are vestigial
appendages. Michael Burstein also writes about a sentient personal
weapon, this time with more benevolent consequences.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. has a longish, reasonably
interesting story that resorts to technobabble again, and my attention
lapsed more than once. William H. Keith has the most interesting
story in the book, a history of the distant future in the mode of Olaf
Stapledon, with clashing galaxies, group minds, artificial
intelligences, and other speculations. Brendan Dubois follows with
a fascinating little piece about the last days of the President of the
United States. Michael Williamson's story is okay, with less
political content than most of his work, and Brian Stableford finishes
up with another good story, a very different take on biological
weaponry. All in all a readable, fairly diverse collection with
one outstanding story, "The Weapon", by William H. Keith. 4/24/07

One of the pitfalls for authors to avoid in
crossover stories blending SF and mystery is that you can't cheat.
If you're going to introduce a technology, or psi talent, or other
device not available to mainstream mystery writers, you usually have to
lay out the rules early so that the reader knows what to expect and has
at least a chance to figure out the permutations possible from that
premise. At the same time, it's preferable that the fantastic
element be important to the plot, the resolution, or if possible both.
Mike Resnick has collected here six original novellas that straddle that
borderland and the results are in fact quite good.

Pat Cadigan, whose name shows up much too
infrequently, opens with "Nothing Personal", the story of an aging
police detective who has begun to experience formless anxieties that
seem to have no obvious cause. The situation comes to a head when
she and her new partner get involved in the mysterious but apparently
natural death of a young girl, almost a mirror image of another case
from weeks earlier. I had guessed some of what was going on but
not so much that I didn't enjoy the windup. Resnick follows with a
story of his own, "A Locked-Planet Mystery", wherein a private detective
investigates the murder of an alien magnate in a closed chamber on a
chlorine planet. He was accompanied at the time by one human and
several other aliens, all his subordinates. The story is worked
out in the classic format, a series of interviews, the search for
contradictions, motives, and opportunities. I guessed right on
this one though.

Harry Turtledove's "Hoxbomb" is set on a world
jointly colonized by humans and a semi-compatible alien race (whose
draft animals have names which are "Pontiac" and "Ford" spelled
backwards, and the aliens are "Terrans" similarly reversed).
Shortly after her husband completes a trading deal with a pair of the
aliens, a woman gives birth to a bizarrely disfigured baby, victim of a
hoxbomb, a biological weapon perfected by the aliens, whose culture is
based on biology rather than technology. During the course of the
investigation, detectives from the two races discover that they aren't
as unlike as they had thought. Kristine Kathryn Rusch follows with
"The End of the World", a quite moving story about alien castaways
and their painful assimilation into human society.

Gregory Benford has the best story in the
collection. In "Dark Heaven", amphibian aliens have established an
outpost on Earth, protected by the government. A detective
investigating a corpse found in the ocean and displaying unusual wounds
finds a connection between the dead man and a mysterious sea voyage
which involved one of the aliens. When a second corpse turns up
with the same mutilations, pressure increases to find a solution.
Last but not least is "Womb of Every World" by Walter Jon Williams,
which is cast in the form of a typical fantasy quest adventure complete
with a swordsman and a troll, but it's transplanted to another planet,
there's technology instead of magic, and the villain is straight out of
SF. One excellent and five very good stories here, definitely
worth the entrance fee. 4/24/07

There is always a risk when an author continues a
series started by someone else, particularly a series held in such high
regard as the Dune series by Frank Herbert. Herbert's son Brian
and Kevin J. Anderson have been doing just that for several volumes, of
which this is the latest and - chronologically at least - the last,
since it ties up the loose ends and brings the future of the planet
Arrakis and most of the characters to what appears to be a conclusion.
Unlike some of their earlier efforts, this one is based on an outline
created by Frank Herbert prior to his death, so presumably reflects his
own decisions about the outcome of the epic story he'd begun.
Obviously since this is the windup (although there are obviously lots of
gaps that the authors could go back and fill in with additional titles),
it takes place after Chapterhouse: Dune, which stopped rather
than ended with various characters fleeing from a superior force, and is
also a continuation of the story begun in Hunters of Dune.

If you've read Hunters, you know that by use of
advanced scientific techniques that verge on the mystical,
several of the characters from the original series have been effectively
recreated, including Paul Atreides, aka Mu'ad-Dib, his mother, Lady
Jessica, and his advisor and companion, Duncan Idaho. More
re-embodiments are planned as their flight continues. The Big Bad
in this one is the machine intelligences which have reached a level of
development whereby the existence of humanity in all its diverse forms
is in serious danger. Open warfare continues, with battle fleets
maneuvering for position, the reflexes and wits of humanity against the
cunning and programming of the thinking machines. A plague
threatens to weaken human resolve and there is still dissension among
the various human factions. But the machines have a surprise in
store for them. We also discover the fate of the planet Arrakis,
the secrets of the Bene Gesserit, and have a variety of loose ends tied
up for us. But was it any good? Well, I thought it was
closer to Frank Herbert's original concept than some of the other books
in this new series, perhaps because it was more focused on issues and
events from those books, and I also enjoyed the story reasonably well
for its own sake. That said, like the previous collaborations this
is clearly in a different voice. There is less depth despite the
intricacy of the plot, and at times it felt like an embellished outline
rather than a finished work, which I suppose in one sense is exactly
what it is and what it is intended to be. It's a panoramic
adventure and you'll probably like it, but you won't confuse i with the
originals. 4/23/07

I have read three previous novels by this romance
writer, two supernatural and one SF, and I liked all three. I
glanced at this when it first arrived and assumed it was a romantic
cyberpunk story, which was an interesting juxtaposition, so I moved it
toward the top of the stack. But when I read it, I found it was
something else entirely. The protagonist is Roxanne Zaborovsky, a
typical romance heroine, a young woman caught between two mysterious and
apparently dangerous men, Mason and Leonardo. Each of them asserts
that she is in danger, and that their rival is associated with that
danger, but initially they aren't willing to be more explicit.
Roxanne is also troubled by gaps in her own memory and other minor
oddities in her life, but it is not until later in the novel that she
discovers that these two issues are related and in what way.

The nature of that explanation is subtle,
complicated, and I'm not going to try to summarize it here in any
detail. It involves the nature of reality and our perceptions of
it, and the interconnections among people, but there's a whole lot more
as well. One could call this fantasy as well as science fiction
because it doesn't really explain the mechanism of what's happening and
that, for me at least, was a problem for me was a bit of a stumbling
block. I wasn't always certain that I understood the rules.
So on balance, I didn't like this as much as I did her previous work.
On the other hand, this is one of the most original and interesting
romance novels I've ever read, and if the author sometimes exceeded her
grasp, that's okay too because the more we stretch, the more we achieve.
I may not have thought this was entirely satisfying, but I was
entertained and intrigued enough that I will certainly read her next -
and move it to the top part of the pile when it shows up. 4/23/07

The sequel to last year's Hell's Gate picks
up where the other left off, with a war in progress between two worlds,
Arcana and Sharona, one powered by magic, the other by science.
The opening volume tried to get too much information about the two
worlds into play and introduced too many characters, but the sequel
seems to have gotten much of this under control - although there are
still far too many characters to provide any kind of smooth narration.
The cause of the war is still uncertain, but there's no question that
both sides have thrown themselves into it, employing magic, psionics,
technology, and brute force against each other. The battle will
not take place in their own universes as much as it will in a variety of
other planets in the Multiverse. The motive power prolonging the
war is genuine anger among the population of both realities rather than
manipulation by their governments, which makes a peaceful settlement
even less likely.

Given the scale of events, it's no surprise that
this is a longish novel and that the action jumps around quite a bit.
I suppose you could just as easily call this fantasy as science fiction,
the kind of crossover novel that Lawrence Watt-Evans, Piers Anthony, and
Andre Norton have done in the past. But where they used that
device to concentrate on how characters and events were affected by the
contrast on a broader scale, Weber and Evans have concentrated primarily
on military implications, somewhat similar to the Darkness novels by
Harry Turtledove. The expansive coverage in this one tends to make
the narrative a bit choppy at times, but the sequel seems like a much
more integrated novel than its predecessor.

This hefty hardcover comes with a CD that contains
more than a dozen complete novels, plus artwork and maps that are
associated with them. If you don't mind reading fiction off a
computer screen, they texts are presented here in various formats and in
a very attractively designed framing system. If you don't already
have copies, the CD is probably worth the price of the hardcover just
for its contents. 4/20/07

Poul Anderson is one of a handful of SF writers
whom I enjoyed even more when I re-read them as an adult than when I
first encountered them in high school and college. Although every
writer occasionally misses fire, Anderson had a remarkably high success
rate and he was one of the best at making hard SF accessible to those of
us who never took a science course after high school. This new
retrospective collection brings together some of the very best of his
fiction, including the complete novel After Doomsday, which was the
first magazine serial I ever read, under its original title, The Day
After Doomsday. This story of the survivors of a murdered Earth
trying to figure out who was responsible is still one of my favorites.

The six accompanying stories are just as good, five
novellas including the Hugo Award winning "No Truce with Kings", set
after a future apocalypse. The title story is one of the best
fictional treatments of the relative nature of time at speeds in excess
of light. All of these were originally published during the 1950s and
1960s and they reflect a time when storytelling and the "Idea" were
considered more important than prose and character, so it's particularly
impressive that Anderson didn't neglect the literary side of his fiction
while writing stories that fit right in to contemporary tastes.
"Un-Man" and "The Big Rain" in particular are just as effective today as
they were when they first appeared, and it's great to have them back in
print for a new generation of readers. 4/19/07

I think this is the 25th novel in this
series, which mixes SF and mystery, though it’s mostly the latter. The
setting is New York City in 2060, but other than some window dressing
and occasional side references, it’s pretty much the contemporary
world. A few of the earlier volumes have had more overt speculative
content, but most are ordinary mysteries. The detective is Eve Dallas,
a woman with a troubled past, currently married to Roarke, a very
wealthy man who also has a difficult past, when he was an influential
member of the criminal class. Supporting characters include friends,
Eve’s partner Peabody, and a cartoonish but amusing butler. Eve is
overbearing, self effacing, crude and rude, but she gets the job done.
The novels are written to a formula, usually with two tumultuous sex
scenes between Roarke and Dallas, one of them usually linked to a
quarrel resulting from artificial plot devices sometimes reminiscent of
Marvel Comics. All that said, I’ve enjoyed all two dozen that I’d read
before and fully expected to enjoy this one.

I wasn’t disappointed. The story starts with the
murder, by poison, of an apparently innocuous young school teacher whom
everyone liked. His marriage was happy and there was no friction at
work. There seems to be no motive for his death, and no reason why
anyone would benefit more than marginally, but the poison was not placed
in his thermos by accident. The problem facing Dallas is that all of
the potential suspects appear to be innocent, likeable people with no
reason to wish the dead man harm. Like its predecessors, this is a
coolly plotted police procedural and in due course a suspect emerges,
even though Dallas still has reservations about his guilt, at least of
this particular crime. And when the suspect is himself murdered, an
entirely new range of possibilities opens.

This is one of the best in the series, with a
really chilling villain. It is also one with very little SF content.
There are a couple of references to droids and the year is stated as
2060, but that’s just about it. Frankly, I’ve never understood why
Roberts chose the futuristic setting for the series in the first place.
Whatever category you want to put it in, you should find it a very
intense and compelling story and you’re not going to want to stop
reading until you know the answers. 4/17/07

NESFA Press has another interesting as well as
entertaining volume with this wide ranging collection of the work of
David Gerrold, this one prepared in conjunction with Gerrold's Guest of
Honor appearance at Boskone. Gerrold has not been one of the more
prolific writers in the field, but I became a fan back when he was first
publishing novels like Space Skimmer, When Harlie Was One, and
Yesterday's Children and I still give priority to his new books when
they show up in the mail. There's considerable variety here,
including an excerpt from one of the War Against the Chtorr novels
already published, and a piece of one yet to come. There's also
the complete script for a Star Trek episode, "Blood and Fire",
never produced, and which was also the basis of Gerrold's third Star
Wolf novel, Blood and Fire. For the most part, the short
stories have not appeared in earlier collections and there is some new
material as well, including the introduction by Spider Robinson, a short
humorous piece by Gerrold, several collections of reasonably pithy
quotes, and some fiction. The reprints include some humorous
articles about King Kong, the complete novel Chess with a Dragon
from 1987 - in which we learn once again that it is sometimes smart to
look a gift horse in the mouth, and some good stories including "Digging
in Gehenna", "Dancer in the Dark", and "Riding Janis". Some of
these originally appeared in obscure places so this is the first time
they'll be readily available to many readers. The selections here
are suggestive of the author's range, which encompasses humor,
thoughtfulness, and adventure in settings as diverse as space opera, the
contemporary world, and pretty grim future Earths. It's a good
introduction to one of the most reliable and entertaining writers in the
field. 4/16/07

H.G. Wells wrote this screen treatment late in his
career, 1935, and the movie was released a year later. The premise
is that a new world war breaks out in 1940, lasting so many decades that
the world is plunged back into near anarchy until, exhausted, a new
order emerges which slowly rebuilds a more rational civilization and
uses scientific knowledge to expand into space. Although the film
did not do well when it first appeared, it has since become something of
a minor classic. This is not a smoothly written novel but a screen
story and as such it glosses over or summarizes event, nor does it spend
much time on characterization. Leon Stover has extensively
annotated it, and has placed it in context, drawn attention to points
that might otherwise have been overlooked, and provides other
information which might not be available to the average reader, or
viewer. Although not written specificially for academics, this
edition is intended for libraries rather than consumers, and is part of
the ongoing annotated H.G.Wells series from this publisher.

There are over a hundred black and white
illustrations, mostly stills from the film, which I haven't seen in many
years. Included is a lengthy, negative review of the film,
Metropolis, which Wells found objectionable for philosophical reasons.
The short story, "The Land Ironclads", which predicted the emergence of
the tank as a major instrument of war, and another story, "The Queer
Story of Brownlow's Newspaper", are also included because of their
prophetic nature. 4/15/07

The third collection of Effinger's short stories
from Golden Gryphon is actually dominated by a novel, The Wolves of
Memory, originally published in 1981. A plot summary is going to
make it sound like a routine dystopian adventure story, which it sort of
is but sort of isn't as well. TECT is a supercomputer that pretty
much runs everything and the protagonist, Sandor Courane, pretty much
doesn't run anything. He fails at a series of jobs and is exiled
to a planet reserved for misfits, where he discovers that the entire
population has been given a kind of lingering death sentence.
Sounds routine, but Effinger rarely was and this darkly funny and
sometimes convoluted novels was one of his best. Courane was a
recurring character in Effinger's short fiction as well, although he was
killed a few times and wasn't always living in exactly the same world.
In his introduction, Mike Resnick points out that Courane was partly
autobiographical, one of only three recurring characters in Effinger's
fiction.

The other stories all feature Courane, although not
all of his adventures are collected here. Most are SF but a couple
are fantasy. Of the seven shorts, I'd read all but one before.
They vary considerably in tone and setting as well as subject matter.
"In the Wings" and "The Thing from the Slush" are the two I enjoyed the
most, but I've rarely been disappointed by an Effinger story and none of
them are included here. Effinger's health problems and other
interruptions are probably the only reason that he never became a much
bigger name in the field than he did during his lifetime and, the
Budayeen novels notwithstanding, I suspect he will be remembered more
for his short fiction than his book length work. It's good to see
another volume of them appear. There's also a very thoughtful
afterword by Andrew Fox. 4/14/07

The setting for this very entertaining first novel
is the colony planet Lagarto, which is suffering from a protracted
inflation because its main source of outworld income was undercut by
another source which stole their market and left the world doomed to
become a backwater planet with little hope for its inhabitants.
The protagonist is Juno, a low level police official on Lagarto who has
been forced by circumstances and his own weakness to compromise his
principles and become a paid lackey of influential criminal elements.
Juno justifies his actions because virtually everyone is corrupt,
including the local mayor, and he does draw some tenuous lines about
what he will and will not do. Nevertheless, his equivocations have
made him unhappy with himself and his life and puts unusual and painful
stresses on his family life.

Unfortunately, shortly after Juno reluctantly
accepts a new partner, a former friend of his becomes involved in a
conspiracy that is more sinister than even he can accept, and before
long he's also in trouble up to his neck, learns of an assassination
plot, is threatened with arrest and imprisonment, and finds layers of
treachery and deceit he never suspected. This is a gritty, serious
minded thriller whose only real drawback is that it's sometimes
difficult to sympathize with the protagonist, even though circumstances
often dictate what might otherwise be considered serious wrongdoing.
A sequel is forthcoming. 4/14/07

I thought that once Deborah Ross completed the
Darkover Clingfire trilogy, based on notes and conversations with Marion
Zimmer Bradley before her death, that the saga of Darkover had at last
come to an end. Obviously I'm wrong because this new one, part of
the Children of Kings sequence, is a direct sequel to Traitor's Sun
and continues to fill in the gaps. It's also based on notes
left by Bradley, but I hope this isn't going to turn her into the next
V.C. Andrews, with a continuing parade of books increasingly removed
from the original. It's difficult to determine the original
author's contribution even in most cases where an incomplete manuscript
is left. In this case, there's no way of knowing how closely the
finished manuscript approximates what Bradley might have written herself
and though I know that in cases like this the Big Name Author's name is
routinely included as co-author, I think that in many cases this
deflects the credit (or blame) from the person who actually did most of
the work.

That said, this is a perfectly readable and
entertaining Darkover novel, although it tends toward the fantasy end of
the spectrum. Bradley herself veered in this direction from time
to time, perhaps taking the best of both possible worlds. The time
is shortly after the Terrans have, for the time being at least,
effectively broken off contact with Darkover, leaving a society that is
still bound by tradition but inevitably affected by exposure to
offworlders. Regis Hastur is dead and Lew Alton is preoccupied
with his personal as well as political problems, and as if things
weren't complicated enough, his daughter Marguerida's psychic sense has
cast her in the role of a futuristic Cassandra, predicting crisis and
disaster. A dark presence is using the telepathic web on the
planet as a tool toward world dominance, and Marguerida will have to use
the shadow matrix herself to avert catastrophe. And while the
official contact with the Terrans has been interrupted, there is an
unofficial presence, an offworlder who will eventually play a pivotal
part in the resolution. There's a good bit
of adventure, lots of political intriguing, various mystical activities,
and more than a mild touch of romance. It was nice to revisit an old,
familiar setting, and Ross certainly writes well enough to continue the
series indefinitely, but I have to wonder if she'd be better off
creatively - if not financially - working in a world of her own.

First novelist Kristin Landon takes a slightly
different approach to an older SF theme with this one. Earth has been
destroyed by some artificial intelligences that reminded me a bit of
Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers. Fortunately, some humans had already
reached the stars by that point so the race isn’t wiped out, although
the survivors live in constant fear that the Cold Minds will find them
and finish the job. The protagonist is Linnea Kiaho, daughter of a
family that is just managing to support themselves. In order to help
with the finances, Linnea decided to become a kind of indentured servant
on another world. Her patron soon considers her more than a simple
servant, but their lives are about to become more stressed than ever,
because there is evidence that the machine intelligences have gotten
wind of where the humans are hiding and may be on their way to finish
the job. And the patron, Iain, is involved in some complex politics of
his own. The blend of SF and mild romance is reasonably good but the
angst between the two principle characters was distracting at times.
4/10/07

One of the refreshing things about Tanya Huff’s
Confederation series, of which this is the third, is that even though
they’re essentially military SF, they vary quite a bit from the usual
pattern and are interesting as novels as well as military adventures.
For one thing, her main protagonist, Torin Kerr, is a sergeant, not an
officer, and though she engages in the usual flaunting of regulations
and orders when necessary to succeed, she nevertheless believes in the
values of the military and is not the openly insubordinate type we’re
using to seeing in this situation. Huff is cognizant of the fact that,
appearances to the contrary, much of the smooth functioning of a
military unit is managed by the non-commissioned officers, sometimes
despite the intervention of the officers themselves.

Her latest assignment should have been uneventful,
even boring. She’s sent to a planet where marines are trained in
simulations, temporarily assigned to help an officer who recently
survived the near total destruction of his body. Everything seems to be
going fine at first, but then the simulations get a little bit too
realistic, and its up to Torin to keep a small disaster from turning
into a much larger one. Who’s behind the change, and why? A nice
mystery wrapped up in an adventure story. 4/9/07

The late Chris Bunch had written the first three
novels of Star Risk, Inc., a kind of combination security service and
mercenary force working in a future interstellar civilization. The
series was on the fringe of military SF and among the best light space
operas of the past few years. Steve Perry, who has written a good many
excellent space adventures of his own, collaborates with Dal Perry to
pen the fourth in the series, which is very definitely up to the
standards of its predecessors. Reversals in the previous volume have
been reversed yet again, but the company’s financial situation is not
enviable when Revered Josiah Williams shows up with a job offer. It
seems that he represents an alliance of labor unions in a remote star
system who are having trouble negotiating better terms with their
employers. Williams wants Star Risk to effectively blockade the system
to prevent the exportation of trade goods, which sounds like a
comparatively easy assignment, but you know as well as I that things
aren’t going to be quite as simple as that. There’s a criminal
conspiracy and a web of secrets to be sorted through. Space opera the
way it’s supposed to be written. 4/9/07

It hasn’t taken long for Richard Morgan to
establish himself with his particular brand of novel, mildly dystopian
novels that use some elements of cyberpunk without becoming completely
wrapped up in that single aspect of his future societies. His
characters tend to be dark as well, not villains but not traditional
heroes either. A case in point is this new title set in a future where
humanity has expanded into the solar system, but without solving the
many problems of Earth. Carl Marsalis is a byproduct of one of those
problems. The government attempted to create a more efficient soldier
through physical enhancement and training, but the program failed and
the subjects were let loose in the world despite the occasional
psychological problem. Marsalis supported himself for a while as a
professional assassin but of late has decided to find a new kind of
life. Alas, his past isn’t through with him yet.

Another of the enhanced subjects, called Thirteens,
has apparently gone completely rogue. When Marsalis is arrested, he is
offered a deal. His part of the bargain will be to track down the other
man. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, think again
because there are plots within plots, confused motives and shaky
alliances, and secrets to be revealed. There’s a considerable amount of
violence along the way, and some thoughtful examination of moral issues
like euthanasia, human experimentation, and the limits of patriotism.
Morgan’s future Earth is filled with contradictions, unresolved
problems, conflicting interests, compromised morals, and corrupt
authorities, and the fact that it feels so real is at times a bit
depressing. It’s only a matter of time until one of Morgan’s novels
hits the right chord and grabs an award or two, and this might be the
one. 4/8/07

This is the debut issue of a new small press SF and
Fantasy magazine, with nice cover art though the interior work is rather
more varied in quality. As you might expect, a market paying such
low rates is going to feature primarily lesser known authors, and that's
the case here. The first story, by Justin Stanchfield, nicely
evokes its setting, an ice moon where the operator of heavy equipment at
a mining project has to choose between seeing the woman he loves just
before she leaves to return to Earth and rescuing a stranded party of
travelers. Pretty good up until the end, which is rather weak and
marred by some corny dialogue. A minor vignette by Daniel Ausema
follows, and then a much longer story set in a primitive society by John
N. Baker. Not badly written but not the kind of thing I generally
enjoy. John Rosenman's "High Concept" is the best story in the
issue. A frustrated man creates an imaginary older brother who becomes
less than imaginary in short order. Kurt Kirchmeier has a clever
piece about a school for young gods and a class in...er, um..creationism
I'd guess you'd call it. "Iron Man" by Greg Jenkins is another
minor vignette. Gene Stewart's longer story is okay but a little bit
disorganized. Edward Muller's space adventure, "Prizes", was
entertaining but I couldn't get into Bruce Golden's "The Apocryphist".
Michael Pignatella closes the issue with another okay story. The stories
by Rosenman and Kirchmeier are the best in the issue.
Subscriptions are $20 for four issues from Zeta Centauri Inc, 3156
Portman Road, Columbus, OH 43232, or thru their website,
www.zetacentauri.com/magazine.htm. 4/7/07

Allen's previous novel, The Cause of Death,
introduced the Bureau of Special Investigations, a kind of interstellar
human FBI in a distant future in which humans find themselves the
newcomers in the interstellar neighborhood. That one was a
convoluted murder mystery; this one has some of the same elements,
but is very different in execution. One of their agents
disappeared after being dispatched to the Metranans, one of the older
races who believe they have achieved the pinnacle of technology and
biological research and who have one of the most static civilizations in
the galaxy. The agent is eventually found on his drifting
spaceship, having died of old age despite his relative youth. He
was carrying a message and a deciphering key, and the key is missing,
probably concealed somewhere aboard although the best efforts of the BSI
(and whoever murdered him) were unable to locate it.

Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson are sent to find
out what happened during his visit, ostensibly to solve the mystery of
their co-worker's death, but also to find the key if possible. It
would be to the advantage of the human race to prove itself reliable.
They arrive to find near chaos following the leak of information that
someone had discovered a way to dramatically extend the Metranans' life
span, but that the knowledge had been lost or suppressed. Also
present are representatives of another, even more hidebound race who
conceal their true nature inside nearly impenetrable environmental
suits. The two investigators discover plots within plots before
unraveling the truth.

I've also enjoyed Allen's novels. He has a
clear, expository style that seems almost relaxed even when the action
is hot and heavy. I'm also a fan of crossovers between mystery and
science fiction. Although I liked this new one reasonably well, I
was uncharacteristically impatient with it. Virtually nothing
happens during the first two hundred pages except conversations among
the two agents and a brief glimpse at the alien culture. I didn't
actually skip ahead, but at times I was tempted, and the second half
picks up the pace nicely all the way to the finish. There's at
least one further installment in this series on the way. It will
jump to the top of the stack when it arrives. 4/5/07

There was a time when satires were an honored part
of SF. Alas, for some reason whimsical commentaries on
contemporary problems seem to have gone out of fashion, probably because
the real problems have become so prominent that readers prefer not to
think about them when they turn to entertainment. So the few
satires that do continue to appear are mostly from small presses like
this one, an imprint I'd never heard of before this intriguing novel
arrived in the mail except for a single anthology (which included a
small portion of this novel in fact). It's a first novel, although
the author has sold some short fiction, and it's very similar to the
satires that Shepherd Mead, Benjamin Appel, Harold Livingston, and
others wrote in years gone by.

Damien is an ordinary person, a valued office
worker and a good neighbor, but he has this little problem. At
first it was just a predilection toward odd odors, but now it's an
outright obsession, an addiction to the smell of skunks, and his
neighbors and co-workers aren't at all happy with the situation.
Eventually his penchant for raising skunks complicates his life even
more, and then he meets Pearl, a fish fetishist who is also a brilliant
scientist who has found a cure for global warming. Sort of.
Her solution is a new form of life that grows like a coat of vegetation
over the surface of the ocean, producing lots of nice carbon dioxide,
but with obvious undesirable side effects. Their budding romance is
interrupted by crisis, however, when the animal control officer impounds
Damien's pet skunks as a community nuisance. Unable to rescue them
before they are put to death, he quits his job and sells his house,
intending to move somewhere more amenable to his desired lifestyle.
And his new life must include Pearl as well as the skunks.
Definitely not for every taste, but obviously quite out of the ordinary.

I generally prefer the sword and sorcery side of
the Warhammer universe rather than the military SF like these two
titles. Partly that's because most of them are closer to the
Robert E. Howard tradition than the Tolkien or wargaming traditions, and
partly because much of their military SF includes or at least implies
the existence of magical or supernatural entities, and that jars with
the interplanetary setting for me. The best of the SF end of their
spectrum avoids or minimizes the latter and a few mainstream SF writers
like Ian Watson and Brian Stableford have written pretty good entries in
the series. The track record for authors whose work is pretty much
confined to this single publisher is less impressive, but there are
exceptions. The foremost of these is Dan Abnett, who writes the
best of their space adventures including this, the latest in his subset
about Ravenor, an official inquisitor whose job is to seek out evil
doers both external and internal. Ravenor's latest adventure takes
him somewhat out of his ordinary frame, which is constricted because he
is confined to a kind of glorified wheelchair and environmental suit due
to hostile action years before. That makes it a little difficult
for him to disobey instructions and embark on a personal campaign to
hunt down those responsible for the murder of some of his peers, but
that's exactly what he and a few companions do in this new adventure.
There were a few places where I thought the dialogue was
uncharacteristically clunky, but it's not a major problem. One
caveat, however; the story is not complete and continues in Brothers
of the Snake, not yet published.

James Swallow has not confined himself to the
Warhammer universe and has written novels in the Judge Dredd and other
sequences, although all published by Black Library under that imprint or
its Black Flame persona. This is also part of a subset, the Horus
Heresy, penned by multiple authors, involving the traitorous actions of
a portion of the human empire and its conversion to evil. This is
the story of a ship that is rushing to carry news of the betrayal back
to the authorities when it is damaged and stranded in hyperspace, and
hyperspace is the land of the evil creatures that plague the universe.
I managed to work around my prejudice against this mixing of genres by
interpreting the latter as just super-aliens, and found the book
reasonably enjoyable though a bit slow at times. Another caveat
here, because you won't be able to find out the end results of the
conflict until the rest of the series is published, but at least this
installment is fairly complete in itself. I know that game and
other media tie-in novels generally get snubbed by most mainstream SF
readers, but if you're looking for light space adventures that aren't
full of meaningful commentary on the human condition or veiled
references to contemporary politics, these might be just what you're
looking for.

Volume 12 in the popular Starfist military SF
series. The expansion of the human race through the galaxy has not
been without its problems. Rebellions, indigenous alien races with
barbaric societies, and star traveling races with higher technology.
Now the biggest threat of all looms ever closer as the alien Skinks
advance their campaign to exterminate humanity. As divided among
ourselves as we always are, some parties choose to take advantage of the
concentration of forces along the perimeter of human space to foment
rebellions and takeovers within human civilization, even if that weakens
our overall defensive posture. This is the story of one lone
outpost that finds itself surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, but not
out thought or out fought by their enemies.

There's not a great deal to say about the plot,
which is essentially a series of intense battles between the marines and
their enemies. We all know they're going to win in the end, but
it's still interesting to see how they essentially outsmart the
opposition. Sherman & Cragg are noted for their very realistic
ground combat sequences and this one is no exception. It would be
nice to see them expand on the basic formula a little, but they've been
so successful with it that one can't blame them for hewing pretty close
to the standard line. And I don't know of anyone alive doing
better military SF.

It is only appropriate that an anthology whose
theme is the conflict between man and technology should open with a
Berserker story by Fred Saberhagen, and this one does, a collaboration
with Jane Lindskold. Alas, this isn't one of the better ones, full
of action but with a flat, unsatisfying ending with the tragic hero
indulging in self sacrifice. Brendan Dubois follows with a more
interesting variation of the post-apocalypse war, this one set after the
kind of apocalyptic events of D.F. Jones' Colossus or Philip K.
Dick's Vulcan's Hammer. The computer systems designed to
protect us became self aware and turned into a danger rather than a
benefit, and the population rose and destroyed everything with
microchips, effectively destroying contemporary civilization and leaving
North America a balkanized remnant of its former self. Loren
Coleman adds a readable but unremarkable story of a technology laden
military operation.

Rick Hautala's "The Hum" is the first really
outstanding story in the collection. People begin to hear an
almost subliminal hum that becomes more annoying and pervasive with the
passage of time, and no one can determine the cause. There have
been news stories in recent months about communities plagued by very
similar phenomena. Hopefully Hautala's apocalyptic explanation
isn't the correct one. Bill Fawcett then returns to the military
theme and Ed Gorman adds the much more interesting "Moral
Imperative", involving adultery and religious passion in a high tech
future world. William Keith returns to the military theme, the
best of that subset in the book, a war to end wars in the very distant
future, a struggle between group responsibility and individuality,
between freedom and paternalism, between inorganic and organic life.

Artificial intelligence is also central to "Chasing
Humanity" by Brad Beaulieu, a name new to me, but the story is one of
the better in the collection. L.E. Modessit Jr.'s "The
Difference", the best piece of short fiction I've seen from this author,
similarly explores the effect of artificial intelligence on society, in
this case when the computers running major installations begin to waken
to self awareness and decide to do something more interesting than just
run a factory. Stephen Leigh and Richard Dansky provide creditable
but fairly predictable stories, after which comes Simon Brown's very
entertaining "Reiteration", wherein humans and aliens mix sailing
vessels with advanced technology as they battle on an alien sea.
Jean Rabe's story of a man who spends much of his life hating a
locomotive provides a nice change of pace, and a refreshing change of
perspective. Similarly the protagonist of Russell Davis' "Engines
of Desire & Despair" concludes that machines are by their very nature
evil. S. Andrew Swann concludes with another strong story, "The
Historian's Apprentice", in which it is the machine that makes the moral
decision that may be too selfless for man to choose for himself.
All in all, a solid if unremarkable collection, with the best stories by
Swann, Hautala, Beaulieu, and Modessit, and not a single clunker.

A few years back, I read a fairly large selection
of Star Wars novels for younger readers, quite a few of them by Jude
Watson, but somehow I missed the fact that they were still coming out.
Watson has a separate series, of which this is the seventh book, most of
which apparently feature Ferus Olin, a surviving Jedi we didn't know
about who has been searching for more of his kind, encouraging the
rebels, but who is often forced to serve the Emperor or Darth Vader for
one reason or another. This time, however, he is working for the
rebellion, because Vader and company have a new secret weapon, and Olin
intends to steal the secret for the good guys. Watson's books are
always well written, if a bit light, but since the movies themselves
were meant to appeal to the young, these don't feel out of place at all
even if they aren't written with the level of sophistication of those
designed for the adult market. I haven't read any of the earlier
novels in this series, and I probably won't go out of my way to look for
them, but if I happen upon them, I would probably find a way to work
them into my reading list.

Most science fiction novels that hope to tackle
serious issues - bioethics, global warming, cloning, cultural clashes,
or whatever - deal at least primarily with one topic and use other
issues, if at all, simply as part of the background or to provide a
subplot. Susan Palwick's latest is much more ambitious than that,
addressing a wide variety of topics at the same time. My previous
experience with the author's work, particularly the marvelous and
touching Flying in Place, tipped me off in advance that I was
going to be introduced to a cast of vividly conceived characters, and I
wasn't disappointed. If anything there was too many of them, and I
wanted to know more about each of their lives. The characters
include a sort of artificial intelligence - a dead man translated into
electronic life, a homeless man whose memories have been erased because
he tried to help a child, a woman who disappeared for five years, and
another who finds herself sucked into this woman's orbit. There's also a
sentient house, a much more benevolent one than in Dean R. Koontz's
Demon Seed. And part of the story evolves because the house
offers shelter to a homeless man, which it should not have been able to
do.

This is, I suppose, a mild dystopia, but it's more
about the terrible things we sometimes do to ourselves and others rather
than what is imposed on us by a cold and distant government. And
it has an upbeat ending, although not because the rebels assassinate an
evil dictator and bring about democratic reforms but because the
characters discover some of the flaws in their own personalities, the
reasons why they have been less than kind to one another, and move past
that to a different kind of relationship. Proof, if we needed it,
that a novel can be an intense, gripping experience even if it isn't
filled with derring do, scientific marvels, and a cast of larger than
life characters. This one's likely to be an award contender next
year, although the low key cover seems aimed at a non-genre audience.

The latest reprint theme anthology from these two
veteran editors has a surprisingly large number of entries which I
hadn't run into before, even more surprising because they're uniformly
good stories. The theme is games which endanger people's lives, so
it's only appropriate that the lead story be Robert Sheckley's classic
"The Prize of Peril", still as effective today as it was back in the
1950s. With the exception of Kate Wilhelm's contribution from the
1970s, all of the remaining stories have been published during the past
decade, in as varied places as Interzone, Salon, and Analog.
It would be difficult to pick out the best stories here, but William
Browning Spencer's "Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness" is another
favorite of mine and Alastair Reynolds' "Stroboscopic", Allen Steele's
"Her Own Private Sitcom", and Jonathan Lethem's "How We Got in Town and
Out Again" are all excellent. The best of the stories new to me
was "Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland" by Gwyneth Jones. The
selection is excellent not only because of the quality but because the
stories are quite varied despite the common theme, thereby escaping
monotony, a frequent malady of the theme anthology.

The last successful teenaged science fiction series
was, I believe, the Roswell series by Melinda Metz. These are the
first two volumes in a new series by paranomal romance writer Gena
Showalter, and I doubt that they'll make it as the next such hit.
For one thing, her world is very different from the one we live on, and
not very attractive. Aliens live on Earth, all sorts of aliens,
some with rather unlikely physiologies, others so close that they can
pass for human. In fact, the authorities have a serious problem
discovering the aliens who hide among the general population.
There is also a special branch of the government, Alien Investigation
and Removal, which responds to any violent crime by an alien with
overwhelming and lethal force, directed toward any human accomplices as
well, and they act outside the law and are apparently not accountable
for what they do. The entire premise for the series is suspect,
and the sexual content is intense enough that we won't see this one
turned into a prime time television show. There's also a
structural problem. The recurring characters are minor and, based
on the first two in this series, each book will focus on a new
protagonist, which won't do much for continuity of interest.

What are they actually about? Well, the first
one deals with a teenage girl who is semi-addicted to a drug used to
track aliens. She and her mother don't get along until she is
recruited by the agency, trained to be a killer, and then demonstrates
that she can be responsible. Oh, and she goes to bed with her
instructor after lusting after him a lot. The second one, slightly
better, a coming of age story with another teenage girl, this one
inadvertently putting an undercover operation in jeopardy before her
help is enlisted to ensure its success. Completely implausible
scientifically and logically, these will drive science fiction readers
crazy. If the MTV crowd is less demanding, they may find these
moderately entertaining.

Ian McDonald's latest is a panoramic view of
Brazil, or a kind of Brazil. We see the country through three
separate story lines. The earliest is 1732. A monk has been
sent from Europe to deal with a problem that is exacerbating tensions
between religious orders as well as with the mundane authorities.
A priest in a remote part of the Amazon has undertaken a dangerous and
possibly heretical course. The monk's mission is to recall or
neutralize him, reminiscent of the central plot in Apocalypse Now.
The mission is complicated by rumors that a band of angels has appeared,
slaughtering the unworthy and carrying off others.

The second plot is set in the present. An
ambitious young woman makes a living developing reality shows, but
rivalries within her organization as well as a changing political
climate are causing her considerable frustration. Adding to her
woes is a series of incidents where an apparent doppelganger acts in her
name, endangering her own plans. The third sequence is set thirty
years in the future. A small time thief gets involved with a woman
who specializes in quantum physics involving multiple universes.
When she is killed, she is replaced - not by a ghost but by a version of
herself from an alternate reality.

The real focus of the novel is the setting, which
McDonald illustrates in three different eras, pulling them all together
through the device of quantum physics and the malleability of reality.
His prose is, as always, a joy to read. This is a major novel from
a major talent.

Sometimes the most unprepossessing book can be a
real find. That's the case with this title, originally published
in Spanish in 2002, translated by Cheryl Leah Morgan. The novel is
something of a re-imaging of Karel Capek's classic The War With the
Newts, played out on a smaller, more intense stage. The
nameless narrator has agreed to operate a weather station on a remote
island in the Antarctic, living by himself for a full year. He
explains that he hopes to catch up on his reading, although there are
vague suggestions that he may have other motives which he has not
admitted even to himself. When the ship arrives to drop him off
and pick up his predecessor, there is no sign of the other man. In
fact, the only other inhabitant of the island is found in a nearly
comatose state, living in the lighthouse. Gruner appears almost
certainly insane, refuses to say what happened to the other man, and is
even suspected of having murdered him.

The narrator decides to stay against the advice of
the captain. That first evening, his house is assaulted by a horde
of bipedal amphibians who are very much like the salamanders in Capek's
novel. He manages to fight them off, but when they leave at
daybreak, he is exhausted, injured, and nearly prostrate with terror.
When he seeks refuge in the lighthouse, Gruner refuses to let him in,
even threatens to shoot him. Dismayed, the protagonist returns to
the cottage, finds two rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition
among his supplies, and decides to fortify his own lodgings, hopeless as
that might be. He feels such hostility toward Gruner that he is
tempted to shoot him and, later, attempts a physical assault that
reveals an odd fact. Gruner has been keeping one of the female
creatures as a servant, even dressing her in human clothing. The
narrator takes the servant prisoner, which drives Gruner into a frenzy,
although it is only later that we learn that she is also his sexual
partner.

Spoilers follow. Gruner is forced to allow the
narrator into the lighthouse, which he has transformed into a fortress,
and the two of them become more amicable as they fend off increasing
numerous and desperate attacks by the creatures. The level of
violence escalates rapidly, from shotgun to modern rifles to deadly
explosives on one side, from random assaults to constant major
offensives on the other. Much of what follows is nightmarish, but
the narrator begins to undergo a slow epiphany, realizing that the
creatures share many attributes with humanity, that they are just
seeking to defend the one piece of land that belongs to them, that they
are capable of entering negotiations and abiding by agreements. He
even imitates Gruner by having sexual relations with the female, and
later adopts one of their orphaned children. Unfortunately, Gruner
cannot see them as anything but a threat and that is ultimately his
undoing. The narrator reaches an accord which Gruner violates,
resulting in his own death, and the hostilities resume just as his own
relief arrives. If there was any doubt in the reader's mind that
this was designed to illustrate the endless cycle of war, the author
dispels that by revealing that Gruner is NOT the lighthouse keeper.
He's the missing weather station operator. And the relief crew
mistakenly believes that the narrator is Gruner. The new
replacement is attacked the first night of his stay and the contretemps
with the narrator starts a recapitulation of his own confrontation with
Gruner. If the man really was Gruner.

The pointless waste of it all is pretty evident. One
might wonder why the weather station on an uninhabited island would
contain so much weaponry, but I think that's deliberate, reflecting the
propensity of governments to stockpile armaments for which there is no
obvious purpose. This can be taken as SF, as satire, or even as
horror, but it should definitely be on your reading list.

I don't know much about this publisher but they
appear to be a small press, mostly print on demand, and none of their
writers are anyone I've heard of previously except for Darrell Bain, who
has had a few previous small press titles . They recently sent me
a selection of their past books, and I managed to fit a couple of them
into my reading schedule. Both are relatively short and
attractively packaged. The first one has an intriguing setup.
Exact duplicates of people begin appearing out of nowhere, plopping down
beside their originals, but unlike the Body Snatchers, these creations
are all dead. But where are they coming from, and why? Some
of the speculation comes straight out of the old pulps and isn't very
plausible, and that a scientist could come up with the right theory -
supercomputers in an alternate universe - seems a bit of a stretch.
It's the kind of invasion story that John Russell Fearn and Robert L.
Fanthorpe based their careers on, but considerably better written.

The second title borrows its plot from "B" SF
movies. A medical worker is accidentally infected by blood from an
emergency room patient, who is taken away by armed government officials
in a very secretive manner. He subsequently falls ill, but
recovers feeling better than ever before, and passes on the infection to
a friend. Old physical defects are repaired and sex is greater
than ever, but he has essentially become a fugitive. Eventually they are
enlightened by an alien who tells them they are carrying an alien
symbiont which, unfortunately, will kill most humans who are infected.
The story lost me a little at this point because of some shaky science;
the alien is indistinguishable from humans, and tells them that there
are hominids on every Earthlike planet her people have visited. A
protracted chase sequence follows with the government finally helping
the aliens to leave Earth.

Both books are competently written, probably not
well enough to please one of the major publishers but better than much
of the small press stuff I see. The collaboration has a more
original plot, but the second title is slightly better constructed.
Neither book is good enough for me to run out and buy other titles by
either author, but both are good enough that I'd probably read more by
them if it came my way. Available through Amazon and the Twilight Tales
website.

Despite his occasionally hokey science, I’ve always
enjoyed Michael Crichton’s thrillers. He is a consummate story teller
with a superb sense of pacing and tension. Most of the time. I was
very disappointed by his last book, State of Fear, not so much
because of the message it was designed to convey – Crichton believes
that much of what we have been told about global warming is fantasy –
but because he spent so much time lecturing the reader that the story
just never came together. So I had put off reading this new one because
I knew it was about genetic manipulation and feared that it would be
very much the same.

The good news is that it is better than the last,
at least for the first two thirds. Crichton does raise a good many
ethical questions, but he doesn’t attempt to answer them all and he
leaves the clear impression that this is such new territory that we need
to tread carefully so that the benefits of this new knowledge can be
realized without too many of the less savory side effects. His opinions
are expressed more forcefully in an afterward, but teven there he often
suggests that we need to know more before making decisions. The novel
tackles everything from gene therapy to attempts to increase the
intelligence of animals through transgenic mutation to societal
engineering to the ethics of experimentation on human and/or animal
subjects. Some of the characters are appealing and some are not, but
even the latter occasionally give voice to rational, even compelling
arguments from their point of view. It appears that Crichton wants to
make us think this time, but isn’t so determined to shape our
conclusions.

The first bit of bad news is that the novel tries
to cover so many things that it is very unfocused. There is a huge
collection of characters and situations, and we jump from one to the
other so frequently that the first half of the novel has a lot of false
momentum that falters because none of the individual story lines seem to
be moving toward a resolution. There are the makings of at least two or
three good novels in here, but none of them ever coalesce sufficiently.
The shotgun approach raises lots of interesting questions, but the
diffusion robs them of any immediacy.

Worse, for me at least, are those places where
Crichton makes leaps of extrapolation before he has properly properly
prepared the groundwork. For example, it’s quite a jump from proving a
company’s legal right to market a line of disease resistant cells
harvested from an individuals while he was under medical treatment, to
assuming the legal authority to kidnap his grandchildren and perform
surgical procedures on them because they are committing a felony - theft
- by having inherited the same genetic material. To say nothing of the
fact that no corporation would ever openly declare that they had such a
right and risk the public outcry that would certainly ensue. The fact
that there is a subsequent legal opinion overruling their conclusion
doesn't make up for the fact that their initial acceptance of the fact,
and the advice of their attorney that they can legally kidnap children
to harvest their DNA, is simply implausible.

Nor did I believe for a second that a man could
successfully enroll a transgenic ape in school as a human being –
without a birth certificate or physical – by claiming that it was a
human child with a birth defect and a genetic defect that resulted in
excessive hairiness. These two incidents alone were so unrealistic that
I was no longer able to emotionally invest myself in the story from that
point onward. It’s a shame, because Crichton raises legitimate issues,
and because he still writes crackling prose when he’s concentrating on
that instead of his message, but this is another one of those books were
the well intentioned message swamped the storytelling.

The Last Colonyby John Scalzi, Tor,
5/07, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-765-31697-4

This is the third in the series that started with Old Man's War. John Perry has fulfilled his military obligations
and settled with his family on a colony world, but having once had a
taste of the wider universe, he finds his new environment pale and tame.
It appears that the planet Roanoke has been settled for the usual good
reasons, but if the name of the planet didn't warn you that something
sinister is underway, events soon will. Humans are playing a
delicate diplomatic and military balancing game with an alien empire
that wants to see an end to human expansion. Although ostensibly
supporting Roanoke's colonists, the authorities actually have decided
that it will play a very different part in the game, and I don't want to
tell you too much here and spoil the surprise, although you should be
able to guess at least most of what's going on well in advance.
Petty and his wife object to being pawns, no matter what the ultimate
objective might be, and they eventually take a hand that will alter the
rules of the game. A blend of military SF with the planetary
adventure story. Scalzi has been compared to the early Robert
Heinlein and the comparison is a valid one, and I don't imagine it will
be long before he moves his first Hugo Award to his mantelpiece.

Jon Moore is a kind of low key James Bond, an interplanetary
adventurer who makes use of nanotechnology and an artificial
intelligence named Lobo to accomplish his missions. The conflicts
around him are less military than commercial, although sometimes it's
very difficult to tell the difference, and dead is dead regardless of
the attitude of the killer. His latest job is to rescue a
kidnapped girl, but some very odd developments arise in the aftermath,
making him wonder just what it is that he has gotten involved with this
time. The hi-jinx escalate from there, with intervals of banter
between Moore and Lobo that would have been more interesting if Lobo had
been individualized a bit more. There's plenty of action though as
they thread their way through traps, treachery, and the terrors of
corporate finagling. There have been short stories featuring this
duo as well, and I would not be at all surprised to see more novels.
Nothing deep or relevant here, just good old fashioned murder and
mayhem.

The first science fiction novel in the new Solaris line is one of
Thomas' visits to Punktown, an urban setting on a distant world where
humans and aliens interact, with more than a touch of cyberpunk but
somewhat wider horizons. A darker and more complex version of the
Mos Eisley spaceport of Star Wars. Jeremy Stake is a somewhat
seedy private detective who is hired by a prominent and rich local man
to find a rare living artifact, a doll that belongs to his teenaged
daughters and which is mysteriously missing, presumably stolen.

Stake has an unusual talent, although some times it's as much a curse
as an asset. He's a chameleon, a shapechanger whose appearance can
be altered very quickly to resemble others. But Stake is not the only
one who isn't what he appears to be. His new employer hasn't told
him the whole truth, and the living doll he's pursuing is more than just
a very sophisticated plaything. Lots of revelations, twists, and
turns will follow. Although there's a pretty good mystery here,
the real charm of the book - if that's the right term for a novel about
a generally repulsive society - is the evocation of a corrupt, many
layered, city where high tech and low morals co-exist, where gangs prowl
the lower levels in an entirely different environment from that of the
wealthy who live, literally, above them. Stake is a brooding
figure whose personality fits perfectly, and I was reminded at times of
the promising early works of Piers Anthony (pre-Xanth) like Chthon.
Thomas seems to have grown more confident of his material with each
book, and this is far and away the best he has done, clear evidence that
he is evolving into one of the more exciting talents in the field.

The alien Tarsalans have no true concept of personal property, so
when their negotiations to settle on Earth prove unfruitful, they act
precipitously, creating a barrier around the entire planet that cuts off
sunlight and communication with the colonies sprinkled through the solar
system. As the ecological situation begins to degrade, teams of
scientists desperately try to find a way to pierce the shield. The
sections dealing with the interactions between humans and Tarsalans are
the high spots in the book, but they're not as engaging as the similar
interactions in his earlier Tides. The plot is otherwise a
semi-interesting scientific puzzle with a few brief action sequences.
I wasn't really attracted to any of the characters either, which made
the story seem rather flat.

Mary Rosenblum's first novel, The Drylands, appeared way back
in 1993, developing a theme and setting she had used in earlier short
stories. It is the Pacific Northwest of the future after global
warming has altered the ecology of the world dramatically. Water
is so scarce in North America that it is the most valuable commodity,
administered by the Army Corps of Engineers, conducted through massive
pipelines. While the populace alternates between apathy and
rioting, it seems that the situation is getting worse rather than
better. Life in the barren areas is also having an effect on human
heredity. This new volume includes that novel, plus three short
stories using the same setting. There are two other Drylands
stories, not included in this volume. In the novel, a military
officer tries to intercede between the army and a group of farmers who
have become increasingly desperate. An undercurrent through all is
the fear felt by those with subtle mutations caused by the drought
conditions - a presumption that takes something of a leap of faith - but
it provides another degree of depth to the conflict. Her most
recent novels are more polished, but this one remains entertaining as
well as thought provoking.

It has been around forty years since I first read
Slan, A.E. van Vogt’s first full length novel. The popularity of
Slan among fans in the 1940s is not surprising. Slans are
mutants with superior physical and mental skills, including telepathy,
believed by humans to be the product of some exotic artificial
manipulation of the DNA of infants. They are believed to have been
designed by a scientist named S. Lann six centuries before the events of
the novel, and they are named after their supposed creator, but it is
never clear how the world comes to believe that he could propagate
millions of them among the population, or how the knowledge that they
were being born as a natural form of evolution could not have emerged
during the centuries of their existence. Although they were briefly in
the ascendant in human society, there was a war and they are now in
hiding, hated, feared, and persecuted because they were different.
Since many SF fans also felt persecuted and despised for their bookish
ways, identification was inevitable and the phrase “fans are slans”
became part of the fannish vocabulary. Groups of fans lived together in
“slan shacks”.

Rereading the novel now, I was struck almost
immediately by its lack of imagination. Although we are told that
centuries have passed and that Earth is now ruled from the city of
Centropolis by a nearly absolute dictator, there is little to
technologically distinguish it from the present. People drive around in
cars, carry handguns and anti-aircraft batteries, and apparently live
very much like we do. True, a secret organization has space travel, but
their secret is closely held, and the highly advanced airships don’t
travel much faster than present day aircraft. There is a brief attempt
to explain all of this late in the sequel, presumably by Anderson, but
not convincingly. It doesn't matter in any case.

The original story is told from the point of view
of two young slans. Jommy Cross narrowly escapes capture when his
mother is killed and lives with a grasping, repulsive old woman for
several years, waiting for the day when a post hypnotic compulsion will
lead him to his father’s discovery. During that period he discovers the
existence of the tendrilless slans, slans who lack the tendrils in their
hair that makes telepathy possible. For some reason, this group is as
hostile to true slans as are the humans. The second viewpoint character
is Kathleen Layton, a slan held prisoner by the dictator, Kier Gray,
apparently because her ability to eavesdrop on the thoughts of his
enemies proves useful.

Layton later becomes the target of a lustful
councilor, Jem Lorry, who purportedly wants to discover if slans and
humans are interfertile, although we learn in the sequel that he is
himself a tendrilless slan and that his excuse must therefore be no more
than that. She attempts to avoid his attentions by lying to a council
meeting in the most awkwardly written sequence in the book, wherein they
set out their rather unbelievable plans to eradicate the slans before
realizing that they are revealing their intentions to a telepath. We
also get confirmation that Kier Gray, the supposedly anti-slan world
dictator, has some secret sympathy for the girl, if not for slans on the
whole. The sequel opens with the revelation that he is himself a
slan, and that he has been arrested by his security chief, John Petty,
who plans to rule the Earth himself.

Reading the early chapters, presumably by van Vogt,
I was struck by how little the author's style had changed even after a
gap of fifty years. There is the same lack of sophistication in
the characterization, the same awkward phrasing and casual attitude
toward science, the same naiveté about the way politics unfolds and
human interactions intermesh. The second half of the novel has
smoother prose, but Anderson wisely doesn't try to radically alter the
style and does in fact capture a great deal of the spirit of van Vogt.

The story itself is almost secondary. This is
an exercise in nostalgia rather than a fresh new novel. The
tendrilless slans have a secret base on Mars from which they launch
thousands of ships to attack the Earth, which they do primarily by
dropping bombs. Jem Lorry is revealed to be one of their agents, a
megalomaniac who tries to become dictator of both races. Jommy and
Kathleen rescue Kier Gray and are chased about the countryside as it
appears that the human race is headed for extinction or slavery.
And where are the true slans?

Slan was not van Vogt's best novel, but it
is certainly his most famous. It is fitting that the sequel he
began should also be his last published. Readers unfamiliar with
the field are probably going to be puzzled when they read this, because
it's so unlike what currently appears in the field but long time fans
are going to find in it a ticket back to their own past.

James Hogan's latest is rather less ambitious in
scope than most of his earlier work, even though it involves the
extinction of human life on Earth. Venus is a thriving human
community which has sent extensive research teams to the now dead third
planet in an effort to figure out just what it was that led the human
race to extinction. We see most of the action through the eyes of
a spaceman and a scientist, but there's not a whole lot of action to
see. Much of the novel consists of ruminations about international
politics, the short sighted polices of the 20th Century and onward,
followed by the discovery that tailored viruses were created which
targeted specific ethnic or racial types. Unfortunately, these
viruses mutated and it seemed inevitable that everyone would eventually
become vulnerable.

Unfortunately for the novel, there really isn't
much in the way of surprises for the reader. The secret of what
happened to the human race is pretty obvious, and the side plots
involving Venusian politics adds no real suspense to the slow unraveling
of various puzzles in the ruins of Earth. This hovers somewhere
between hard science fiction and a cautionary novel, but it doesn't
really settle in any one place.

The interest in superheroes in the movie industry
has been substantial in recent years, and the headline news of the death
of Captain America in Marvel comics recently reflects how much the
formerly despised "comic books" have become a part of our culture.
There have been many superhero novels, most of them tie-ins to films or
graphic material, most of them not particularly elevating. There
have been a few exceptions. The Wild Cards series edited by George
R.R. Martin is the most exceptional, a series of mosaic novels in which
mutated humans become a part of ordinary life. There have been
occasional other novels of merit as well, but few of them as interesting
as this debut novel from a writer who also designs interactive games.

Grossman creates a cast of original super-powered
characters in this, including the cyborglike Fatale, the martial artist
Blackwolf, the villainous Doctor Impossible. Their powers come
from a variety of sources, ancient gods, accidents, mutation, curses,
alien technology, radiation, or just plain magic. Heroes and
villains interact but this isn't about physical battles as much as it is
about the characters, and it is actually remarkably non-violent.
It's also an alternate history because the superheroes have been around
for quite a while - a long while if you include time traveling events.
It's surprisingly effective, particularly in bringing such unlikely
characters to life. I hardly even noticed that it was written in
the present tense, which normally drives me to distraction. An
excellent testimony to the fact that in the hands of a talented writer,
even the most unpromising premise can be turned into something
marvelous.

I think this is the tenth book in this series, if you count the
anthologies, although it's more of a shared world than a series at this
point. This particular title advances the main story line which,
if you haven't read the others, involves a town from contemporary
America sent back through time to the 17th Century. There they try
to influence human civilization to adopt more democratic and libertarian
policies despite the inertia of ages of political repression. In
those earlier books, particularly 1633 (also by Flint and Weber), the
influence of the Americans has had some effect, but it has also led to
the formation of two alliances in Europe. Opposed to the new
progressive movement are the government of England, Spain, France, and
other countries who view this reformist program as a direct threat to
their status quo.

The authors introduce a number of military anachronisms including the
use of ironclads in the Baltic Sea, which makes for some impressive
cover art, but most of the story is spent following the adventures of
several Americans scattered through Europe on various missions designed
to advance their agenda and interfere with the plans of their opponents.
The novel is big enough to cover all of their individual stories
adequately and I was particularly fond of the naval sequences, having
recently read two books about the early ironclads in the American Civil
War. Flint and Weber have consistently proven to be best of Baen's
team of writers, and this is certainly their most effective
collaboration.

My biggest problem with Warhammer novels set in the distant future is
that I find the juxtaposition of starships and space marines with demons
and magic so jarring that I'm often unable to get involved with the
story. A secondary problem is one common to all military SF, that
a large proportion of it is repetitious and trite. There are just
so many times I can read about a young cadet saving the day, a rugged
commander beating the odds in a complicated space battle, a crew of
misfits turned into heroes, or a mutinous crew subdued and taught the
error of their ways. There are exceptions, of course, and writers
like David Feintuch, Mike Resnick, and Elizabeth Moon have proven that
there are new things to be revealed in old situations.

So when I read the blurbs on this new novel, I was a bit hopeful.
I've read a couple of Goto's earlier novels, and they weren't bad, and
this one looked to be quite different, in cultural background if not in
the basics of the plot. A young warrior labors under a prophecy
about his future as he seeks to restore the prominence of his family in
a galaxy torn by warfare. Unfortunately, the result was a novel
that read like the latest installment in the Battletech universe, and
despite some more than adequate prose, I still had to struggle to reach
the end.

The Long Twilight and Other
Stories by Keith Laumer, Baen, 2007, $14, ISBN 1-4165-2109-7

The late Keith Laumer was one of the masters of the light, mysterious
adventure, and it has been very good news that Baen has been bringing so
much of his work back into print. This particular title includes
two of his better novels and four short stories, one of which has not to
my knowledge been previously collected. The Long Twilight
(1969) is a kind of precursor to the Highlander movies, without the
magic. Two larger than life immortal characters have been locked
in battle since prehistoric times and, in the near future, their
conflict is about to reach its climax in a quest to control an
experimental nuclear facility that could pose a threat to the entire
earth. Slightly dated, but Laumer's transparent and deceptively
light narrative style will sweep you past any little anachronisms you
might encounter. The second novel is Night of Delusions
(1972) is even better, the story of a man hired by mysterious elements
within the government and provided with technology that seems to have
come from an advanced civilization. Add dream therapy and aliens
and you have a frantic but controlled romp.

There was a time when graphic novels meant lots of sex and violence,
but it's come to mean comic books with visions of grandeur in recent
years. This is one of them, a complete series of eight
installments originally published as separate comics, now together in
full color for the first time. The premise is that a small
community decides to effectively secede from the outside world and
create a circumscribed environment of their own. Although the
older members of the community are united in their attitude, the younger
generation has ideas of their own. This is marginal SF at best,
although it feels decidedly fantastic at times. The story lines
are good and the dialogue crisp, but the artistic style - blurred edges,
indistinct features, vague suggestions of backgrounds - might fit the
material but it doesn't do anything for me visually.

When I first started reading science fiction, I was particularly fond
of the grand tour novel, stories where the protagonist travels through a
series of strange worlds. Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict,
Gordon R. Dickson's Mission to Universe, Murray Leinster's
Colonial Survey all caught my imagination. Necessarily the
visits were brief, tantalizing, leaving ample room for my imagination to
fill in the gaps. Nowadays authors are expected to fill in a lot
more of the detail, and while that makes their imaginary worlds more
believable, it is less likely to stimulate my sense of wonder.
Sean Williams threads a path between the two extremes in his latest, the
story of a man who is reassembled after his death, and who sets out on a
voyage of discovery to learn the truth about his past, and what led to
his violent, though temporary, demise. This appears to be the
first in a promising new series from one of the few writers still
producing consistently excellent space opera

Ken MacLeod takes a look at what might be our personal future, a time
just a few years from now after the war in the Mideast has expanded and
led to devastation and disorder, and to the proliferation of nuclear
weapons in the hands of terrorists. In an England where the limits
of freedom are already being constrained, someone sets off a nuclear
device in Scotland, accompanied by various other acts of violence.
There are obvious answers, but they're not necessarily the right
answers. One group insists that a secretive US organization was
behind the bombing, as a pretext for intervening in the British Isles.
Just who is a real civilian and who is actually working for British
Intelligence? Can you be a loyal Briton while simultaneously
spying for the French? Are the news stories carried on the
television mostly true, or mostly propaganda? Is the next world
war inevitable or is it just a scare tactic employed by governments
hungry for more power over their respective populations? For
answers to all of these questions - maybe even the right answers -
you'll have to read MacLeod's newest, a fast moving, extremely readable,
though often depressing story of our world as it might be.

Although I've read several novels by Louise Marley and remember them
fondly, I don't think I had ever consciously noted any of her short
fiction, if I've read it at all prior to this book. There are ten
stories here, spanning a wide variety of settings and themes. The
book opens with the title story, a moody piece about the conflict
between the rights of the individual and the dictates of society.
The next is a lighter, and better story about the integration of female
players into professional baseball. The next two are relatively
minor, although I liked the western motif in one of them, sharing the
author's fond recollections of the work of Zane Grey. "Jamie Says"
is a thoughtful look at questions of gender that doesn't descend into
pedantry and is my favorite in the collection. The balance of the
book includes a light fantasy, a musical prodigy, a religious novice
with an unusual affliction, and a fictional meeting between two musical
legends. All of Marley's stories are centered on the characters
rather than physical events, but not at the expense of storytelling.
If she was more prolific at this length, she would almost certainly be
numbered among the most promising short story writers working in the
field.

One of the handful of SF novels that
formed my lifelong affinity for science fiction was Non-Stop by
Brian W. Aldiss (then known in the US as Starship), and even
though it has been several year since I last re-read it, I still
remember Roy Complain's amazement when he discovers the truth about his
world. This new novel illustrates some truths about our world, and
although I can't say that there is anything in it that I find surprising
or implausible, it is frequently just as emotionally powerful.
Paul Ali is by birth a Muslim though he has rejected that heritage and
thinks of himself as an Englishman. When he writes a novel that
has a comical remark about assassinating the Prime Minister, he finds
himself arrested and imprisoned as a terrorist. There he is
subjected to a series of beatings and tortures by the Hostile Activities
Research Ministry, a kind of Kafkaesque organization of American and
English inquisitors and special agents. Paul's only escape is into
a world of imagination, the fictional colony world Stygia where the
mechanics of colonization have left everyone with certain physical and
mental impairments and where his alter ego is involved in an attempt to
assassinate the planetary dictator. Evens in the imaginary world
often parallel those in the real world.

This was a painful book to read, in part because it cuts a bit close
to the bone, since to some degree we know that our governments are
involved in just exactly the kind of atrocities that Aldiss describes.
There is also a sense of inevitability about the story, and the feeling
that we've read all this before. There are echoes of George
Orwell, with touches of the darkest sort of humor. It may have
been a tactical error to have Paul bewildered and passive right from the
outset, because there were times when I felt impatient with him, even
while I detested the two chief inquisitors. This is a novel which
I suspect will be more highly regarded when there is some distance
between it and the current political climate. At the moment, it
may be too painful for many readers.

Spoiler alert. I actually picked this up thinking
it was a mystery about Jack the Ripper, which it is, but since there’s
time travel involved, it’s SF as well, a kind of reversal of Karl
Alexander’s Time After Time. In the year 2007, a secret
government project is poised to explore the past when one of the
administrators, Jonathan Avery, makes an unauthorized jump back in time,
determined to change the past in some unspecified manner after assuming
a new identity as Sir Jay Osborne. A young woman, Sara Grant, makes an
equally unauthorized jump to stop him, and then a military officer,
David Elliot, makes an authorized one to recover them both. They all
land up in 1880s London, just in time to get involved with the Ripper
murders, but Avery arrives three years before the others, buys up
literally every newspaper in the city, and begins his elaborate plan to
alter history. The other two become reluctant allies arrayed against
him, with the ambiguous help of Jonas Robb, a gentleman who has stooped
below his station to become a police inspector.

This is a first novel, so
I was prepared to make allowances, but unfortunately there are so many
things wrong with the plot and the author’s narrative strategy that it
is difficult not to sound cruel, even though there are times when the
story moves quite well, and Baker does a pretty good job of evoking
Victorian Whitechapel. But the plot suffers from so many small flaws
that they become a major problem.

First of all, let’s look
at Baker’s view of time travel. Although Avery begins making changes in
1884, they don’t arrive until 1888. Their strategy is to stop him and
somehow reverse his changes. They never seem to consider returning to
the present, recalibrating the machine, and going back to prevent him
from causing them in the first place. Secondly, although the past has
been changed, those changes are not yet reflected in the present,
because it takes “time” for them to somehow filter up the timeline. I
know this is a logical inconsistency found in many other time travel
stories, and I might have ignored it for the sake of the story, but the
rest of the time theory is so hokey that the cumulative effect was to
unsuspend my disbelief. As if that wasn’t bad enough, although Sara is
determined to reverse Avery’s tampering with time, she admits later that
the official first mission was supposed to change the timestream
so that people in the future could tell that it worked. Not only does
that invalidate her objection to Avery’s agenda, but it also makes no
logical sense. If time is changed, the future is changed, so no one in
2007 would know that they are now living in an altered stream of
history.

Presumably Avery arrived
with a bundle of money, since he was able to purchase an entire
industry. Within three years he is the most powerful man in London, has
been knighted and is an advisor to Queen Victoria, and has built an
informal militia in Whitechapel. We’re never told just how he
accomplished all of this in such a short period of time, but the breadth
of his influence is so pervasive that I became skeptical quite early.
For that matter, how did his two pursuers arrive within seconds of each
other, but both of them three years after Avery, even though the time
device had the same settings? Grant’s PDA operates for months without
recharging thanks to its “nuclear” power source, and where in 2007 would
she find one like that which also has seemingly infinite capacity and
the ability to project holographic images of its content? One secret
technology – time travel – I can accept in the contemporary world. Add
in miniaturized nuclear power, revolutionary storage capacity, and
holographic projection and you’ve just sprained my ability to suspend
disbelief fatally. And later we discover that Avery has an instant
counterfeiting machine as well, and has flooded the economy with bogus
money, though no one seems to have noticed.

There are other little
gaffes and coincidences, like Elliot just happening to get a job in the
same house where his great-grandfather was working, just happening to be
opening an account in a bank when Avery visits. Robb is present at one
of the Ripper crime scenes when Grant shows up. He notices her looking
at the faces of the crowd and knows she is looking for someone who
doesn’t look surprised or horrified. How does he know that unless he’s
telepathic? Grant herself must have some sort of psychic power because
when she finds one victim’s body, after it has been moved, she can tell
from the eyes that the woman was gazing at a fixed point slightly above
her, proving that her killer was a tall man. Neat trick that. Indeed,
all the characters seem to have mystical powers. Although we are told
that Avery could not possibly remember the name of Jack the Ripper since
he doesn’t remember his own name, a logic I cannot follow, he would
nevertheless have an “instinct” about the victims.

As I mentioned, Baker does
a good job with the historical detail, including the Ripper killings,
but why does someone warn Grant about Jack by name after Mary Nichols is
killed but before Annie Chapman? It may be that Avery has jumped the
gun on history and provided the name early, but the mechanism is never
explained, and since the other Ripper details take place with such
accuracy, this one instance jars. It also strikes me as implausible
that with Whitechapel so altered due to Avery’s manipulation, that the
killings would still take place exactly as they did in the original time
line.

Now let’s turn to the
narrative style. In the first twenty or so pages, Baker introduces
seven viewpoint characters, with scenes taking place in four different
years, and the story jumps from one to the other constantly, sometimes
three times on a single page. Although this technique can sometimes be
very effective, it is very jarring if it occurs before the reader has
had time to become familiar with the different personalities. I had to
constantly pause to remember which character was which, particularly
because one of them operates under two different names. And then
there’s figure of speech overload. The fecundity of similes and
metaphors is so overwhelming that it becomes funny. On page 43, for
example, there are four of each, like two teams of horses straining at
the reins. This tendency does ebb in the second half of the book, but
it is very intrusive during the early chapters.

I also had a less easily
articulated problem. Conflict is necessary to advance a story,
obviously, but there seemed to be too much of it this time. The
characters are almost always angry, and there’s a good deal of violence
that happens so close together that I became rather jaded. There’s a
street riot, the Ripper killings, an assault by four toughs, the
constant arguing between the two time travelers, and between them and
Robb, between Avery and his assistants, even among a group of
prostitutes. It’s very difficult to sustain a single mood for over
three hundred pages without becoming stale.

Back to the plot. David
burglarized Avery’s office and steals his futuristic gadgets, as a
consequence of which they conclude that their enemy has suffered some
form of amnesia. They consider exposing him to something familiar in
order to stimulate his memory, but are somehow convinced that such a
shock might drive him insane. This peculiar and unlikely conclusion
becomes, unfortunately, a significant plot element affecting their
future actions. They also conclude that Avery is using the Ripper
killings to foment unrest against the government, and suspect that he is
himself the Ripper. Sara and David twice burglarize Avery’s safe, which
he apparently never locks even though it is filled with money.

The point of their mission
gets even murkier as their very presence causes constant alterations in
history. David saves the life of a child who should have died, and
Sara’s romantic entanglement with Robb and her efforts to help him solve
the Ripper murders have similar consequences, although neither of them
appears to realize this until too late. Time is against them, because
Sir Jay, who appeared out of nowhere three years earlier and has no
family, is being talked about as the next Prime Minister, though how as
man without a party could defeat Salisbury and Gladstone for that post
is a mystery to me. Sara finds a photograph of Osborne with four of the
actual historical characters who were at one time suspects, although two
of them were subsequently proven to have been incarcerated during some
or all of the critical period. Her conclusion is that the Ripper was
actually several people working cooperatively.

The climax is equally
frustrating. Queen Victoria intercedes on behalf of Osborne even when
it is clear that his actions could bring down the government and lead to
revolution. Neither she nor the author explains why she should make
such an extraordinary decision, nor is it likely that her ministers
would have acquiesced in their own destruction. By the 1880s, Victoria
had already been reduced to essentially a figurehead, at least in part
because of her own withdrawal from society after the death of Prince
Albert. Osborne is partly foiled, so he frames David for the Ripper
killings, despite the evidence Sara had previously made available to
Robb implicating the actual people responsible.

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction
edited by George Mann, Solaris, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 1-84416-448-0

Solaris is a new imprint of BL Publishing, best
known for the Warhammer game tie-in novels and other media related
work. This is their new, mainstream SF and fantasy line, and this is to
be a regular anthology along the lines of Orbit and Universe. The
initial volume opens with a long story by Jeffrey Thomas, set in his Punktown series, about a war veteran with a unique problem. The
protagonist of “In His Sights” is a modified shapechanger, that is, his
face alters to assume the characteristics of anyone who looks at for
more than a few seconds, although one assumes he had more control of it
during his stint as a spy. The story really isn’t clear on this point.
He returns to civilian life with a problem, however. His face is stuck
in a semblance of the enemy race and he fears for his life if he appears
in public. But his greater fear is internal because he has lost himself
psychologically as well as physically. During the war, he became
romantically involved with one of the enemy, and killed another whose
face haunts his memory, and which has partially replaced his own.
Emotionally charged, and with a nicely symmetrical ending that satisfies
even if you see it coming.

“Bioship” by Neal Asher has some
remarkably vivid imagery, but I never quite was able to identify with
the plight of the non-human protagonist stalked by a sadistic captain
aboard a living sea vessel. Jay Lake and Greg Van Eekhout teamed up for
“C-Rock City”, a story set in a city comprising three linked asteroids,
ruled by a petty tyrant who used slave labor to build his little empire,
and expelled them all through the airlocks when they were finished. The
first half of the story is very evocative, bringing a fairly complex
environment to life, establishing the character of the protagonist, who
is on a secretive quest to find his mother, one of the slaves who worked
here. The transition from tourist to quasi-rebel is a bit too abrupt,
and we never really learn how some of the slaves have managed to survive
hidden from the authorities, which weakens the latter half of the story
somewhat. I had the sense that there was more story to tell and that
its absence was a critical if not mortal blow.

James Lovegrove is one of several
British SF writers whose work has not yet found a home in the US, for
reasons which escape and occasionally dismay me. Nevertheless, here’s a
chance to sample his work, and it’s one of the best short pieces I’ve
read in a long time, a genuinely funny satire in which an experimental
virus transmitted by word of mouth (yes, that’s what I said) makes it
impossible for those infected to swear. The results threaten to
paralyze England and, presumably, the rest of the world in due course,
so the authorities decide to deliberately release a counter virus, which
only makes things worse. This one is worth the price of the book all by
itself.

Almost as amusing is Paul Di Filippo’s
“Personal Jesus”, wherein quantum physicists inadvertently create an
access to the substrate of the universe, allowing each person to own a godPod that allows personal communication with an omniscient if rather
inscrutable God. The interaction becomes almost constant, raising
questions of free will, until an apocalyptic event reveals an
unsuspected aspect of the divine. Peter Hamilton’s “If At First…”
proves that even old, familiar plot devices can be interesting if
presented in a slightly different fashion. It’s a time travel story in
which a man is able to convey his adult knowledge to his childish self,
repeating the process so that each iteration increases his power and
knowledge. The narrator stumbles upon the truth but is destroyed by his
ineptitude. Adam Roberts presents an unusual colony world in “A
Distillation of Grace”, settled by a religious group which reduces its
numbers by half during each generation, distilling their genetic pool
down toward the final descendent, the Ultimate, whom they believe will
transform the universe.

In Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact”, an
astronomical event spells the end of the world, an event we see through
the eyes of a handful of people. Although at times poignant, the
characters are all a bit too passive to be entirely credible. Ian
Watson creates another of his very strange alien race in “Cages”, in
which Earth is invaded, sort of, by millions of hoops, through which
alien bees visit. At the same time, every human on Earth above a
certain height is inflicted with an alien artifact grafted onto his or
her body, their purposes unclear, and in one sense these are the cages
of the title, although it also refers to the traps we make of our own
lives. Mike Resnick and David Gerrold lighten the tone considerably
with “Jellyfish”, which spoofs elements of A.E. van Vogt, Philip K.
Dick, James Blish, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein,
L. Ron Hubbard, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut, and others, including
themselves, in this tale of a drug addicted SF writer whose latest novel
about a race that lives in a non-existent universe threatens to make
them existent. It’s a variant of the character coming to life story.

Mary Turzillo’s contribution is set on
Mars and follows the adventures of a family who are temporarily
displaced from their home due to the machinations of a fanatic. The set
up isn’t bad but the payoff is mildly disappointing. It reads like an
excerpt from a longer work. It’s always a treat to see something new
from Brian Aldiss, but all we have this time is a very short parable
about human destructiveness and cruelty. The next two stories, by
Keith Brooke, Simon Ings, and Tony Ballantyne, lose some of their effect
because they mirror themselves or other stories earlier in the
collection in one way or another. “The Accord” by Brooke involves the
creation of a world supermind and its interaction in the world by means
of organic extensions. I think the reason I had difficulty with this
story is that I never really understood the setting and the subsequent
plot seemed distant. “The Wedding Party” by Simon Ings had a different
problem. In order to immerse oneself in a story, there needs to be a
reasonably familiar focus. Usually this is the protagonist, but
sometimes it’s the setting, or some element of the plot. I couldn’t
find a focus here. The action skips about too much for me to identify
with the characters, or even get to know them, and the setting varies
almost as quickly.

Tony Ballantyne and Eric Brown provide
stronger entries to end the volume. Ballantyne’s “Third Person”
presents a fascinating glimpse of a new kind of war, one which I would
like to have seen explored at greater length. Brown’s “The Farewell
Party” is another story of the benevolent invasion of Earth, or is it
benevolent? In this case, the ambiguous ending works well, even though
we never really learn the motivation of the alien Kethani. All in
all, this is a well balanced, high quality collection with no bad
stories and a nice mix of serious and humorous, far future and near
future, quiet and disquieting stories. A promising debut to what
will hopefully be a long running series.

Brenda Cooper’s first solo novel (she previously
collaborated with Larry Niven on Building Harlequin’s Moons)
involves a set of six genetically enhanced children who find themselves
stranded on a hostile colony world. Not only is the local ecology
dangerous, but the human inhabitants distrust them because of the
alterations in their physiology, forcing them to live as outcasts. But
they are far from helpless and will surprise their unwilling hosts more
than once before they’re done. Good plot and some nice touches with a
few slow spots. It reminded me of the intricate personal interactions
in Pamela Sargent’s Cloned Lives and, more recently, Burning
the Ice by Laura J. Mixon. Characterizations were particularly well
done. The intolerance of the colonists is realistically, if rather
depressingly, convincing.

Allen Steele’s newest novel is set in the Coyote
universe, although it is only peripherally concerned with that
rebellious and now independent colony world. Strange signals from an
alien race originating on a mysterious object in a distant stellar
system stimulates the creation of a sophisticated scientific
expedition. The ship is launched and subsequently disappears for
decades, causing consternation if not outright alarm. Eventually the
ship reappears, but with only a portion of the original team aboard, and
the survivors, if that’s what they are, do not appear to have aged a day
during the interim. Their story of what they encountered when they
reached their destination is likely to alter humanity’s future forever,
though at times it appears that the other characters don’t always
recognize this fact. Steele’s consistently strong narrative abilities
combine with an interesting mystery, a provocative revelation, and a
cast of interesting characters. This one should tune up your sense of
wonder.

This is the novel Dickson was working on at the
time of his death, posthumously completed from his notes by his
associate, David Wixon. It continues the story of Bleys and the Others,
an offshoot of humanity whose mutant strain leads to a predictably
dichotomy. Should their abilities be used for the benefit of humanity
as a whole or should they consider themselves a separate and potentially
superior species? Interstellar political intrigue with touches of high
adventure, but a bit talky for my taste. Dickson managed to examine
some very thought provoking issues in the guise of straight forward SF
adventures, and those who dismiss the Dorsai novels as lightweight
military SF are missing the best part of the novels, as are those who
read it specifically because they enjoy military SF.

Ben Bova’s entertaining hero Sam Gunn has been
around for a long time, witness this new collection of approximately
fifty adventures, everything from humor to hard science to social
commentary to high adventure. Most of these were originally published
during the 1980s and 1990s, and I read them then and haven’t re-read
them this time. I remember being entertained at the time, but there
were only a couple about which I could recall more than the title.
Three are original to this volume, and they’re up to snuff, but Bova is
much more effective when he has the space of an entire novel in which to
work. You probably won’t like all the stories, some of which tend to
advocate to the detriment of the plot, but the majority of them are
trenchant, fast paced, and rewarding.

One of Robert Sawyer’s strongest points as a writer
is that his characters are always real people, not stereotyped square
jawed heroes although they may be heroic, not dyed in the wool villains,
though they may commit villainous acts. This new novel poses an
interesting pair of interconnected problems. An alien race has
initiated communication with Earth, their first message deciphered and
answered many years ago, primarily because of the insight of scientist
Sarah Halifax. Due to the immense distances involved, she has become
quite elderly by the time a reply finally arrives, a reply that is
addressed specifically to her, but enciphered so tightly that government
scientists are unable to unravel it. A wealthy philanthropist offers to
pay for an experimental medical treatment which could restore her to the
vigor of their youth. She agrees, but only if the treatment is extended
to her husband as well. In due course, both of them undergo the
process, but while it works in his case, it is a complete failure in
hers. As the two struggle to deal with their new personal
circumstances, they also fall under the shadow of the greater mystery of
the alien race and its cryptic, and world shaking message. Thoughtful,
low key, and convincing. Sawyer has repeatedly shown that he can
portray very dramatic situations in an effective but unmelodramatic
fashion.

Vampire Outlaw of the Milky Way by Weston
Ochse, Bad Moon Books, 2007, no price or ISBN listed

This is to be the first in a series of projected
limited edition novellas under this imprint, with a deluxe edition that
includes an “epic poem” which I have not seen. Ochse’s tale is an
offbeat SF adventure rather than horror, a touch of Leigh Brackett with
a hint of satire. A young autistic boy from our world has begun to
retreat further into himself, much to the alarm of his parents who
believed that he was improving. The boy has somehow become linked to
the vampire outlaw of the title, a two fisted, adventurer who, despite
being the vampire of the title, is the hero rather than the villain on a
planet of aliens. The latter adventures are amusingly over the top,
with coincidences, deus ex machine, and other hoary old plot devices
galore, although I found the jumping back and forth to the much more
serious frame story jarring at times. Certainly worth reading if you
can afford whatever price they put on this one.

The steady decline of the SF prozine has been
reflected in the semi-pro publishing area as well, but Talebones
has managed to stay afloat so far, largely because of the quality of its
contents. Like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the
contents range from SF to fantasy to horror, and the diversity of its
contents appeals should appeal to a wider array of readers than if it
was more narrowly focused. The present issue opens, for example, with a
kind of modern folk tale, “His Master’s Voice” by Mark Rigney, a
variation of the deal-with-the-devil story in which folk song collector
Alan Lomax has a series of odd encounters with the Prince of Lies.
Carrie Vaughn follows with “Crows”, a very moving story about a man
guarding the body of a fallen knight on an abandoned battlefield. I was
less happy with Alan DeNiro’s “Gepetto Kiln”, set aboard a starship in
one of those very remote futures where the human race is almost
unrecognizable. While this kind of setting can be used very effective
at novel length – as evidenced by Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, Peter
Hamilton, and others – I find it less satisfactory when that much
strangeness is packed into ten pages. It tends to distract me from the
plot and the characters, and sometimes results in prose that seems
little removed from technobabble like “inverse cognitive overlays” and
“shephardic torii”, that are never adequately explained. The starship is
self aware and when it encounters an unusual planet, a separate
artificial intelligence is manifested.

Marie Brennan contributes a brief tale
of an encounter with fairies, followed by Cat Rambo’s “Memories of
Moments, Bright as Falling Stars”, one of the better cyberpunkish
stories I’ve read recently. Two young people, essentially runaways,
attempt to qualify for an actual job using stolen memory implants and
other means to increase their chances. Jason Stoddard’s “Fermi Packet”,
which mixes virtual reality with first contact, is also quite good.
“Eaglebane” by Ryan Myers is a so-so story about gremlins, and E.
Catherine Tobler’s “And Her Hand, the Stars” is a brief, but touching
inside into the consequences of violence. The illustrations throughout
are first rate, the layout is attractive, and in general this is a
nicely packaged, well balanced issue.

A first novel, and probably intended to kick off a
series of quasi-military space adventures. The protagonist is a female
military officer whose temporary stay on a minor planet is so boring
that she accepts a job as captain of a ship full of misfits. Where have
I heard this one before? Before long they are off into space, with her
trying to subdue the crew into something approximating functionality
while exploring the mysteries of an alien technology and solving a
mystery. The captain also finds time to work a little romance into her
life. Competently done and sometimes quite exciting, with some
promising qualities that might flourish if we were shown a bit more of
the human side of the protagonist.

Well, I still haven’t watched the latest
incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, even though I own copies of
the first two seasons. I’ve started to get a feel for it by reading the
tie-in novels, of which this is the fourth. Steven Harper, who also
writes as Steven Piziks, has provided a very suspenseful installment in
the saga. A space capsule is found floating in space and is taken
aboard. Inside is a single human survivor and a Cylon. The human seems
to have suffered no ill effects and is allowed to mingle with the crew,
which turns out to have been a tragic mistake. A strange plague that
affects the human mind begins to spread through the crew, reducing those
stricken to babbling and confusion. The survivor is in fact the
unwitting agent of a Cylon plot to spread an experimental nerve disease
among their enemies. Since I haven’t seen the program, this felt much
less like a tie-in novel than many I’ve read. I really need to find the
time to watch the DVDs.

I put off reading this one for a while because it
looked to be just another combination of military SF with libertarian
propaganda, but it turned out to be rather different and actually a very
nice alternate history. In Compton’s debut novel, Alaska still belongs
to Russia and the rest of North America has been balkanized, with the
European powers still wielding considerable influence, the United States
and the Confederacy at odds, and Texas independent. Much of the story
is told from the point of view of a Russian American who finds himself
caught up in momentous events beyond his control. The theme clearly
includes stress on the value of freedom and individualism, but Compton
avoids hammering the reader over the head with political theories and
just tells a good adventure story.

Military SF fans take note, there’s a new novel in
the Posleen War saga. This one takes place both on Earth and elsewhere,
the former sections primarily concerned with the latest attempt by the
Posleen to expand their power base, in this case by capturing the Panama
Canal. The forces defending America recognize that without the canal,
they will be cut off from resources that they need to continue the
fight, so despite the reduced state of the surviving military, they
launch an expedition to defend Panama. I don’t entirely buy the
strategy of the invasion and conquest, which seemed to me transparently
artificial, but if you don’t worry too much about the logistics and
logic, the story itself is fast paced and exciting enough for military
SF fans. Those wanting realistic characters and a less simplistic world
view should look elsewhere.

There are parts of this very ambitious novel –
particularly the evocation of an alternate human culture – which I liked
very much, but there were other parts I found so confusing that it
serious detracted from my ability to immerse myself in the story. The
basic plot is that a former space pilot becomes convinced that his
family has been kidnapped into a kind of alternate universe and sets out
to rescue them, losing his memory and overcoming other difficulties in
the process. There’s a quite clever bit of invention in this, a
universe that exists as a kind of tunnel through our own, but there are
so many strange events and concepts that it started to leave me
metaphorically breathless. I had trouble getting my bearings within the
story so that I could understand what was happening to the protagonist,
and what I was supposed to be understanding about it all. Kenyon has
written some very entertaining novels in the past, but I didn’t think
this one measured up to the earlier ones. First in a series.

Some of the choices in Baen’s omnibus reprint
program have puzzled me because of the sometimes deserved obscurity of
the stories in question, but there’s no doubt that his one deserves
re-issue. It contains the complete Instrumentality stories and novels
by Cordwainer Smith, his unique, poetic view at a distant future with
uplifted animals and galactic civilizations. There are so many
classic shorts in here that there’s no point in attempting to list them.
Despite producing a relatively small body of work, Smith remains one of
the most respected writers in the genre. A very nice item with a
low cover price.

Australian writer Bedford’s third novel is a
detective story set in a distant future. The protagonist is a retired
detective named McGee who takes on one more case, when an android is
unjustly accused of murder. The android knows something about McGee
which makes it impossible for her to decline to help. She in turn lists
the age of a dashing interstellar spy, but their investigation threatens
to reveal her secret as well as the truth about the murder. Complexity
ensues, with plots and counterplots, including impersonation by androids
and a variety of murder attempts. A bit wild and woolly at times, but
exciting throughout. Bedford, an Australian, promises to be one of the
more interesting new writers in the field.

These thirteen stories are previously uncollected
and include collaborations with Paul Di Filippo, Bruce Sterling, John
Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Rudy Rucker Jr. As you might expect from
Rucker, many of them involve mathematical speculation and play games
with the physical laws of the universe. The tone is generally humorous,
but a sophisticated form of humor rather than outright farce. My
favorites at the moment are “Chu and the Ants”, “Panpsychism Proved”,
and “Elves of the Subdimensions”, but ask me tomorrow and I might choose
others. There’s also a romp in which President Bush’s daughters are
involved in an alien invasion. None of these should be taken entirely
seriously, even when they’re being serious. Intelligent fun.

Carol Emshwiller’s infrequent short stories are
almost always a treat, but I believe this is the first of her novels to
fall within the SF field. The plot is a variant of the aliens-among-us
theme, but not in its most comon form. Her aliens are few in number and
they are stranded on Earth through a mishap, not by intention, their
hopes of rescue fading quickly. Eventually pressure to assimilate into
the predominant human culture erodes their hope of deliverance and their
unity as a culture, hidden as it is in a remote mountain retreat, but
just when it seems that their choices are evaporating, a rescue party
arrives. Unfortunately, that only raises larger questions of unity and
self fulfillment. The story is an obvious commentary on the
assimilation of immigrants and cultures in general into more dominant
societies, the conflicting senses of loss and fulfillment. A relatively
short, understated, and very effective novel.

Members of a dance company take passage on a
military starship, which causes predictable tensions. The situation is
exacerbated by espionage, the narrow minded attitudes of some of the
characters, and the mysterious and dangerous situations into which the
characters find themselves injected. There’s an exciting story with no
major flaws. The author doesn’t cheat with the solution, and the prose
is agreeable if not scintillating.

Another volume in this venerable collection of
speculative fiction by Canadian writers, including this time stories by
Scott Mackay, Lisa Smedman, Allen Moore, and a lot of names that will
probably be unfamiliar to most readers, some of whom no doubt will
become more familiar as time goes by. The editors contribute
commentaries on fiction in general and Canadian speculative fiction in
particular, plus short biographies of the contributors. Mackay has two
stories, both quite good, and there are other fine pieces by Smedman,
Stephanie Bedwell-Grimes, Moore, and Greg Bechtel, among others. The
stories vary from SF to fantasy, from serious to humorous, and from
theme to theme. Two are translated from French originals. Not every
story will appeal to every taste, but the general quality level is quite
high.

There are very few writers who have been able to
establish an enviable reputation with just a handful of works, but Cory
Doctorow is already regarded as one of the standard bearers of modern
SF, and with good reason. This collection includes six stories and
novelettes, almost all centered about the internet or some aspect of
information technology, including the Hugo nominated “I, Robot”, which
looks at Asimov’s positronic robots from a new perspective, and the
equally highly regarded “Anda’s Game”. The other four, particularly
“After the Siege” and “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, are of nearly
equal merit, the latter portraying a post collapse future, sort of,
where technogeeks save the day. Doctorow’s fiction compares to
cyberpunk, but he has his own distinct take on a possible cybernetic,
computerized future world, and a wry sense of humor that avoids the
bleak visions often associated with the form. One of the best single
author collections I’ve read this year.

The second adventure of Cassandra Kresnov, android,
takes place on the planet Callay, where she has found a place for
herself after defending the current government from its enemies.
Although the planetary ruler values her advice, there are some who
distrust her, at least in part because of what she is. The planetary
population is also divided on a major political issue, is considering
withdrawing from an interstellar confederation, and the uncertainty is
intensified by terrorist attacks, political intrigues, and espionage.
That also provides cover for Cassandra’s enemies, who look upon her as a
dangerous outsider. A well constructed planetary adventure story with
plausible political maneuvering. This was previously published in
Australia in 2003.

This is the first I’ve read by this British author,
who apparently has had two previous SF novels. The story starts with a
first contact with an alien race, reception of a radio signal from
another world that clearly has an intelligent sender. The jubilation of
the SETI scientists is dimmed somewhat by the subsequent appearance of a
mysterious cloud in space, which turns out to be an artifact en route to
Earth, its mission being the destruction of the human race. The plot is
fine, if rather familiar and a bit overly melodramatic at times. Some
of the zigs and zags alone the way are imaginative and interesting.
There are times, however, when I found the narrative itself awkwardly
phrased enough to be distracting.

The seventh Stardoc novel has Dr. Torin suffering
from near total amnesia, following a near fatal accident she survived in
the previous novel in the series, Rebel Ice. She has constructed
an entirely new personality for herself, and even though she has been
reunited with her husband at last, she is reluctant to resume, even by
recollection, her past life. Her convalescence is not going to be
uneventful either, a development which will come as no surprise to the
reader. A race of intelligent reptiles has been negotiating peaceful
relations, but a condition of their continued cooperation is that Torin
come to their world and develop a cure for a virulent plague of violence
that has swept across the planet. Her only hope of saving the day is to
stir up old memories and try to find knowledge she once possessed, but
by doing so she also encounters recollections that she had been
perfectly happy to lose. Another exciting adventure in this well
regarded series, although I thought the plot this time was a bit
contrived. Too many coincidences.

I still enjoy an occasional Star Trek novel, even
though most of them repeat overly familiar formulas. Peter David is
almost always good for a new twist. This is one of his stories of the
Excalibur, a Starfleet vessel with an original crew, and with a
few name changes this could be a non Star Trek space opera. This time
they find themselves involuntarily transported to another universe,
caught between two starfaring races neither of which seems inclined to
help them get home. Their story is interspersed with a crisis back in
their own reality, with Starfleet hoping to contain what could be a
bloody rebellion. Fans of this subset series may be surprised at some
of the course changes this time, including the loss of one of the
recurring characters.

Another couple of shared universe novels here. The
first, which by its title alone pays homage to Harry Harrison’s classic
Deathworld, involves a military expedition to a remote planet to
root out an invading army of orcs. Upon arriving, they discover that
the planet itself is hostile enough to pose a threat to both forces.
Pretty well done military SF adventure. The second title is part of the
Necromunda series, a vaguely cyberpunkish future in which a forger finds
himself in the middle of a gang war. I had trouble finding anyone to
identify with in this one, but that’s common to quite a few cyberpunkish
novels. Given that caveat, it was a reasonably convincing story though
at times I had the sense that there were scenes missing.

Volume 2 of the Lost Fleet series, by John G. Hemry
writing as Jack Campbell, has the fleet still retreating in the face of
overwhelming force. The brilliant but caustic commanding officer
suspects that a straightforward withdrawal will lead them into an ambush
and decides to take some unusual evasive maneuvers, including moving
toward rather than away from the enemy strongholds. This action doesn’t
endear him to the less stout hearted members of his command, and some of
them decide to replace their leader, by force. Straightforward, solidly
written military space opera. Geary is a bit larger than life to be
completely credible, but it’s all good fun and Campbell/Hemry has
actually given some thought to the problems of combat in space. My only
complaint would be that the story concentrates so much on Geary, the
commander, that there isn’t room to develop any of the other characters,
and therefore I cared considerably less what happened to any of them.

I gather this is the third in a series of parallel
universe SF romances, the first two of which I have never seen. An FBI
Agent from our world gets involved with the uneasy cooperation of a time
traveler and a man who is only partly human. The former wishes to
uncover a traitorous plot while the other is simply interested in
protecting the human race from alien enemies. Their efforts become
entangled, and the female agent provides another source of conflict.
The setting was a bit vague, I thought, and some of the powers of the
shapechangers are so extreme that I wasn’t really sure whether to call
this SF or fantasy.

Another first novel, this one set in the futuristic
version of the Warhammer universe. A crack unit of space marines is
sent to the planet Hyades in response to rumors that the powers of Chaos
are acting suspiciously thereabouts. They discover that another unit
has also answered that call, a group with whom they have had unpleasant
encounters in the past. The old animosity rises again and they begin
fighting each other instead of the common enemy. The novel points out
some of the absurdities of warfare, but the story is pretty dull and I
disliked virtually every character in the book, at least in part because
they have all been thoroughly conditioned to function as war machines
rather than as human beings. I suspect that the author spent so much
time trying to make this one strongly linked to the game system that he
forgot to expend some effort making it a good story in the first place.

This is the latest of several books to illustrate
theological issues by reference to SF or fantasy movies and books, but
at least the author this time seems to be reasonably widely read in the
field. Unfortunately, he also ascribes a purpose to SF, a mission to
help us deal with the changes that confront us, which certainly could be
one purpose, but only one of many. His themes include self knowledge,
faith, the future of the church, and various other religious subjects,
and the prose is very readable and rarely preachy. He misses a few
stories I would have considered significant, like “For I Am a Jealous
People” by Lester Del Rey, but for the most part he seems to have
covered the obvious items, and several of the not so obvious. Of all the
books I’ve read on the subject, this was easily the most intelligent and
articulate, as well as the most thorough.

This collaborative novel is set in a familiar
future interstellar civilization. Humans and several other races had in
the past allied themselves and defeated a belligerent and genocidal
species, but the war is over, the soldiers are old or dead, and the
survivors are weary of war. That makes them unprepared for a fresh
danger, an immense fleet of ships carrying a migrating race that
believes not only that other intelligent species are beneath their
consideration, but that they themselves are inspired by a divine power
that makes them fanatical in battle, fearless and determined. There is
the outline of a good story here but I was just so overwhelmed by the
number of characters introduced in a relatively short book that I never
had a chance to hitch my wagon to any of their stars and I reached the
end feeling sort of “so what?”.

Adult fantasy may be displacing adult SF in the
bookstores, but young adult fantasy was already more popular than its
equivalent in the SF field, and the disparity has become enormous in
recent years. Tor books has been dabbling with it off and on for some
time, and among the best of their dabbling is this series by Timothy
Zahn, unabashed space operas with a young hero, wandering through space
with a spaceship equipped with artificial intelligence and an alien
symbiont who can become a kind of tattoo on human skin. The individual
books are semi-complete in themselves, but there is an underlying plot
involving attempted genocide, and efforts to frame our hero for crimes
he didn’t commit. In his fifth outing, he’s still trying to evade his
enemies and find out who was responsible for the massacre of his
symbiont’s people, but he has fresh problems this time. First, his
female friend and her symbiont have been kidnapped, apparently by the
same mysterious entity responsible for the massacre, and Jack himself
has been abducted by yet another alien race, who require his services as
a magistrate. Zahn manages the delicate balancing job of writing a book
with appeal to its target audience without writing down or driving away
more mature readers. This is an exciting space adventure for audiences
of all ages.

The third in the projected five volume Marq’ssan
series is set during the period when the Balkanized North America is
once again starting to draw together after a global war led to the
collapse of much of the existing civilization. The old US government is
attempting to reassert its authority, but discovering that not everyone
is welcoming them with open arms. This lengthy, thoughtful, and
intelligent novel examines the social, political, and personal
consequences, seen chiefly through the eyes of three women – a lawyer, a
businesswoman, and a political activist – all of whose ambitions become
intertwined. The series is an ambitious project that is probably just a
shade too intellectual for the mainstream commercial SF market, but
which should appeal to readers who like something a little more
thoughtful than the latest military SF or post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Although Star Trek is now off the air again, the
novels keep coming, somewhere around five hundred now, I believe. This
is part of a subset that falls within the original show, with James Kirk
and company taking their ship out for a confrontation with a bellicose
Klingon vessel. This has all been done so many times before that the
setup has déjà vu piled on déjà vu, but the author in this case freshens
the concept a little by concentrating on non-series characters, crew
members aboard both ships. The three main focuses are a pregnant
officer under Kirk’s command, a man with a battle scarred psyche, and a
Klingon underling who is caught between his duty to his captain and
pressures by political forces from within the Klingon empire. The
result is a reasonably entertaining space adventure, but I fear that
they’ve mined the Star Trek universe a bit too often, and unless the
editors find a way to open up a fresh vein, the series will likely
wither.

Although this, the fourth in the Crosstime Traffic
series, is not labeled as young adult fiction, it certainly fits into
that category along with Timothy Zahn’s Dragon series, also from Tor,
and it’s the closest we have to the old Winston juveniles. Writing
young adult SF without condescending is an art that writers like Andre
Norton, Robert Heinlein, Alan E. Nourse, and others mastered in the
past, but it’s a form that has become almost an afterthought to both SF
and young adult fiction, which is a shame in both cases.

Turtledove’s series reminds me of Andre
Norton’s Crossroads in Time and its sequels, as well as a number of
adult series with similar settings. There is an organization which
explores alternate worlds, usually in secret, trading merchandise and,
in some cases, ideas as well. In this case, the world is one where the
Soviet Union won the Cold War and now dominates the world. We view all
this through the eyes of two teenagers in Italy, who resent the state
with the usual adolescent rebelliousness, but who become even more
intimately involved when a local game shop is closed down and its
operators forced to flee. The games seemed innocent enough, but the
authorities rightly concluded that they were designed to promote some of
the ideas of capitalism. Our two protagonists befriend one of the
refugee clerks, Edouardo, and conceal him from the authorities, and
eventually he reveals that he is not from their world at all but
actually an interloper from another reality. If he is to return to his
home, he must reach one of the secret gateways without being
apprehended. Nothing earthshaking here, but I found this more enjoyable
than many of Turtledove’s more ambitious works. It’s just a simple
story, told well, and with an interesting setting and cast of
characters.

There was a time when satire was very popular in
SF. Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth wrote several, and mainstream
authors like Bernard Wolfe, Shepherd Mead, Benjamin Appel, Michael Frayn,
and others borrowed devices of the genre in order to poke fun in similar
fashion. Most of these were deliberately written in an exaggerated
manner, with bits of humor that almost hurt because they underscored
things that we didn’t always want to think about. Satire has largely
gone now, perhaps because the pain has gotten greater, but there are
still occasional stirrings. This first novel is one such. Jonny X67
comes home one day to discover that he has been robbed. His entire
house is gone, and he has only a mocking note in its place. That
propels him into a journey of discovery, during which he discovers that
he has also been deprived of himself, his true nature, and the truth
about what is going on around him. Oddly enough, although I’d been
lamenting the lack of satire only a short time before reading this, I
didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I should. The prose is fine, the
humor authentic, the satire barbed, but I kept putting the book down and
finding excuses not to finish. Maybe it’s because the real world has
lately become almost as absurd as the one Scott portrays.

The third novel by British writer Tony Ballantyne
is far and away his most consistently entertaining. It is the far
future, more than two centuries from now. Although humanity has
expanded into outer space, in some ways civilization has become more
circumscribed than ever, in large part because supreme control has been
surrendered to an artificial intelligence known as the Watcher, a kind
of omniscient version of Jack Williamson's humanoids. The Watcher
has a plan for the human race which it believes to be in our best
interests, but naturally the value system of a machine is likely to vary
considerably from that of us organic machines. Enter Judy, who
thinks she's just an ordinary citizen, but who discovers that she is
actually a kind of artificial being herself, created by a mysterious
organization on Earth for purposes of which she herself is unaware.
And beneath the veneer of a fast paced adventure/mystery, there is also
the serious question of just what do we mean when we refer to "life".